


Guiltless

by SheelaNaGig



Series: The Red Line [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus, Dirty Talk, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, SEX!, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Spanking, Vaginal Fingering, i built this ship to wreck, implied choking, sex?, the vindication of karen page in the face of terrible silver age storylines, unbeta'd ya'll
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-09
Updated: 2016-08-15
Packaged: 2018-06-01 04:14:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6500347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SheelaNaGig/pseuds/SheelaNaGig
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Unlike some of the stubborn men she’d edited from her life, Karen Page wasn’t going to isolate herself in despair and let it smother the remaining embers of her faith. She decided to accept a psychiatrist's invitation to talk out her issues before she drowned in them.</p><p>That had been her first mistake.</p><p>***</p><p>Despite being pronounced legally dead, Frank Castle suffered the misfortune of continuing his life. He lived between bullets, stemming the tide of upstart filth rampant all over the country he had faithfully bled for and served. Carnage has become his sole companion. </p><p>But has he burrowed so deep in the shadows that he can't see a light glimmering in the dark?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tight Lipped

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this chapter because fuck silver age Marvel writers for what they did to poor Karen. This is her vindication. It's E-rated so my author's notes might get kinda cursey. Whoops.

There was only so much she could handle before it began to eat away at her. At first her disquiet took small nips, the tinniest nibbles that she dismissed as jitters. Of course she was jittery. She should have goddamn shell shock after all the tribulation she suffered firsthand or to witness in order to write about it. But soon the panic evolved, grew more harrowing by the day until she realized she mislaid great chunks of the cheerful person she used to be. A tub full of drowned children here, a burnt out shell of church there, hate spewing demagogues plastering diatribe over the Bulletin’s front cover everywhere. Bite by soul masticating bite, the world tarnished, made ugly by its emphasis on despair rather than the glimmering hope she’d always unearthed with the barest amount of searching.

But unlike some the overtly stoic men she’d edited from her life, Karen Page wasn’t going to isolate herself in her despair and let it smother the embers of faith. She resolved to talk to someone.

That had been her first mistake. 

Doctor Ludwig Rinehart had seemed so nice at first. A stout blond man of middling height that sported coke bottle glasses, he’d approached her at a Gala held by the Rand Corporation. He’d looked at her kindly when other smarmy men were smirking and offering to procure her drinks—as if their wasn’t an open bar. Instead of treating her as some discarded arm candy, the doctor discussed her articles rather than the cut of her dress or if she had a boyfriend lurking somewhere in the crowd.

“You know who I am and you’ve read my articles?” Karen said, trying not to look as gobsmacked as she felt.

“Of course, Ms. Page. Your work is the ever focusing lens the city needs to look through,” he praised. “You stare into the abyss that others flinch away from or attempt to fill with tawdry gossip.”

She agreed and downed her gimlet, dashing away the taste of this morning meth lab explosion next to a what had been a promising charter school. 

“It is deathly important work that takes a deathly toll.” Dr. Rinehart’s broad features crinkled into that of a concerned father. “Are you seeing anyone? Psychoanalytically speaking, mind you. You must see someone to unload the burden. Trust me, I’m a practicing psychiatrist and would be happy to assist in alleviating the weight of others’ ill deeds.”

That ought to have been a billowing red flag whipping in the winds. She missed it all the same. 

All because she needed someone to talk to. She needed these weights evicted from her mind, to scour away the filth of the dark corners where the savagery of the city had begun fester. Foggy was too busy treading the shark infested waters of clients who were now the sharks. Matt had his priest. She had no one. Well, that wasn’t technically true, but the memory of their last meeting branded her mind, played over and over and she couldn’t go to him. She refused to put either her or Frank through that inner turmoil again.

So she took up the psychiatrist’s offer. Oh boy, what a gullible mark she had made and he played her like a thrift store fiddle. She spent almost the entire first session crying over her brother’s death as Dr. Ludwig feigned sympathy. His performance worthy of a gold statuette. But he’d cajoled her, directed her through the fragile channels of grief and remorse towards more relevant misdeeds. And she’d spilled it all…except her heaviest burden of knowledge. Matt’s alter ego submerged deep in her prudence like a car sunk to the bottom of a lake, guarding its secrets in watery depths while it rusted away. 

At least she’d done something right.

But it didn’t matter. Karen had admitted through bleary eyes and numerous tissues about how she killed Wesley. And it had felt so freeing, so goddamn liberating like a first breath after nearly drowning. Her levity was short lived. Only two weeks later did Dr. Rinehart summon her to his office to twist the screws he’d worked months to sneak upon her. Standing in his dim 46th floor office, she stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the lights of the city gleaming pinpricks before he spoiled the spectacular view.

“Oh, Ms. Page. Didn’t I tell you that you’d only improve if you told the truth? The absolute truth?” The stocky, neatly dressed blond man smiled, if one could call his dead-eyed grin a smile.

She turned from the urban vista to face him, perplexed.“What truth?”

“The one where Matt Murdock is the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, Ms. Page.”

An involuntary flicker of dismay ruined whatever denial she’d stammered out. Shit, Frank was right. She had a terrible poker face.

The doctor took off his glasses and polished them with a pristine handkerchief, shaking his head as he focused on wiping the lenses. “Too late for lies, Ms. Page. If only your mind had been more pliant, I’d have gotten that little secret without going through so much trouble.” He raised his eyes to her, they were broken shards of blue glass that tore and shredded. “Do you know how much trouble it is to run thousands of DNA tests everyday? Even pared down to a few specific races and closed median age range, there are thousands of unique subjects having routine bloodwork at any of the NY Metro Hospital branches.”

Corrupt politicians, ancient ninjas, drug peddling ex-marines were one matter…but iniquitous phlebotomists? Now she’d heard everything.

“And how can you be so sure that Matt Murdock is the Devil? That’s ridiculous. He’s blind for Christ sake.” She grasped for any logical fallacy to blow holes in his conclusion. 

Suffice for Dr. Rinehart to say, for all his armor and precaution to conceal his identity, Matt had left enough of his DNA around Hell’s Kitchen to earn a blood donor sticker many times over. 

“You know, it’s rather funny how the universe works. They say there’s no such thing as coincidence, but Mr. Fisk ordered me to profile Murdock and figure out the Devil’s identity as two separate tasks. The former task brought me to you. How funny life can be sometimes when paths cross.”

A cold fist squeezed Karen’s heart. “Fisk? Wilson Fisk? He ordered you to profile Matt…oh my God.” She clapped her hands over her mouth and took as few steps backwards, bumping into the cold glass pane separating her from a forty six story plunge. “Oh my god, you’ve been working for Wilson Fisk this entire time?” 

“I have you to thank for that,” he said and flashed that dead-eyed smile again. “You made an opening for me.”

The fist on her heart relented. Now she felt the bile rising up, burning the back of her throat until she swallowed it. “You’re his new lackey.”

“I prefer the term _partner_ ,” he snapped. Rinehart anxiously smoothed his tie into place. “I’m ten times the partner Wesley was. He might have been able to micromanage and douse what fires sprang up, but he doesn’t have my talents. My intellect.” A rictus smile broke across his sallow face. “My penchant for the dramatic. Oh, and what a ploy it will be when Daredevil finally takes his fall. And it’s all thanks to you, Ms. Page.”

She shook her head, clearing it to devise some plan, some way out for not only her but for Matt too. And then another revelation dislodged and cracked down on her skull. “You told Fisk about my part in Wesley’s death, didn’t you?”

He tilted his head like a bespeckled owl. “About how you made swiss cheese of his best friend and most favored colleague? Not yet, not if you tell him about the Devil’s identity. In fact, you’re going to tell the greater New York area.”

Her mind had frayed at the thought of being on Wilson Fisk’s shit list, but twined back together so tight it nearly snapped at that last part. “Why would I do such a thing?”

“You should be thanking me, Ms. Page. This is going to be the most important story of your career.” He held up a hand gestured as if he saw the words before him. “The Devil Unmasked! The identity of Hell’s Kitchen devilish vigilante. Or something to that effect. You might want to retool that sub-header.”

“No!” she screamed at him. “No! I would never do that! There’s nothing you can do to me that will coerce me into outting my friend! It would ruin him!”

Rinehart’s thin lips pressed together in feigned contemplation. “Erm, it would ruin Matt Murdock, but not Daredevil. If anything, it would free him from the schism splitting his life in two. You might be doing him a favor.” His uncovered eyes barbed into hers. “Yes, Ms. Page, you will doing Matthew Murdock a favor by revealing him to be Daredevil.” 

His terrible gaze bore into her own and pulled her conscious thoughts, sucking them like a sieve. Maybe it would benefit Matt if he didn’t have to worry about his…

Karen violently shook her head. Her brain felt filthy, like someone had smudged finger prints all over it and she was wiping them away with her own regained will. 

“Of course.” Rinehart threw up a hand in exasperation. “All your prior grief failed to make you malleable to my whims. Why would now be any different?” 

Her knuckles stood stark white where she clenched her fists. The sting of her nails biting her palm grounded her. “What the hell are you?” 

“Gifted,” he offered laconically. “Like your mister Murdock, and a few other persons of interest capering around this city. Would you like to meet one of them now?” He had the courtesy to give her wide berth as he rounded his desk to use the intercom. “Lester, you can come in. Ms. Page is ready to hear my second offer.”

The office door opened and closed. A familiar, horned shadow coalesced from the dark, but it was wrong. It was all wrong because of how much it looked right. _No, Matt’s shoulder’s are wider. His gait is smoother and his posture more rigid. Oh God, but the costume looks exactly like Matt’s!_

Pale light pouring through the broad window revealed a mangy dog dressed in a wolf’s clothing. The costume was perfect. The man wearing it, not so much.

“You see, Ms. Page. You can either save Matt Murdock or save the Daredevil. You can’t save both.”

“I don’t understand. Why is he dressed like that?”

“I’m going to run a little scenario by you. Do try to keep up with the class.” He rested his hands on the small of his back and sauntered over to the Devil impostor. “Lester here has a gift. Why not show Ms. Page what you can do?”

So fast that it was nearly imperceptible, his wrist lifted and flicked. She hadn’t understood just what had happened until she heard the silvery crack of glass from beside her head. A nail lodged in the glass there, driving fractals of fissures through the tempered window. 

The same window she was currently leaning on. 

Karen leapt away from the precarious perch and froze from a worse shock. There wasn’t only one nail, but three. When the hell had he thrown three of them and how the hell did he not hit her? The blood drained from her face, leaving her lips almost too numb to talk.

“They say imitation is just a form of flattery, so I suppose we’re flattering the Blacksmith’s handiwork.” Rinehart shoved his hands into the cleanly pressed pockets of his dress trousers. “Bang up job pinning the DA’s slaughter on the Punisher. Now imagine how the appreciative residents of Hell’s Kitchen will react when the Devil starts slaying his prey with some added collateral damage.”

“Daredevil doesn’t kill. They know that.”

“See how steadfast convictions are when people start turning up dead. Even if they figure out it’s an impostor, the idea is implanted in their heads that the hand which protects could just as easily maim. That these so-called _heroes_ are like guard dogs waiting to turn on those they defend.” He rocked back on his heels, the picture of smug assurance. “He’s going to finish what that single-minded, gun-toting maniac started. With good costuming and unslakable bloodlust, Lester will stigmatize these altruistic vigilantes one bullseye at a time.”

“Fuck you.” She spat him before glaring at the faux Devil. “Frank is nothing like this…this shitbag!”

The impostor leapt over the desk in one swift move. Fingers like a garrote wrapped Karen’s throat before she’d even seen his hand clear his waist. She’d wasn’t sure what happened, but she heard glass tinkle on the floor and abrupt, strong breezed buffet her back. 

“Lester,” Rinehart said like a parent scolding a disobedient child. “As much I’d enjoy watching her bleeding heart smeared on the pavement, we need her.”

The savagery of the man’s eyes burned through the red glass of the mask’s inset lenses. Oh God, not only was he was going to throw her from the window, but he was going to enjoy watching her plummet to her death. She scrabbled for any purchase, anything to hold onto before the mad man sent her for a long drop and the violent stop. She’d been so terrified that Rinehart’s appearance beside them seemed to come from nowhere. 

The doctor grasped the other man’s jaw and yanked his gaze to meet his own. “Lester, do not throw her from the window. Look into my eyes and listen to me.”

The hand that held her yanked her away from steep peril and shoved her into the solid oak desk, the edge of which knocked the wind out of her. Karen hunched over, coughing and holding her stomach yet grateful for any distance from the hazardous ledge.

“Are you going to cooperate Ms. Page?”

She tried to push the words from her throat, but they were stanched by gasps of chilly air. She shook her head. 

“Now’s not the time to stamp your feet and be adorably stubborn,” he warned with vicious shade of drollery. “It’s all simple, how little choice you have in the matter. Either you give Matt Murdock to truth’s flames or the DareDevil will be spit roasted on a bed of deception. Do neither of these, and I tell Wilson Fisk about how you shot his cohort in a blaze of righteous prejudice.”

Tears trickled from her eyes in a pathetic stream. Shit. Why was she so damn weak? She couldn’t out talk him like Foggy, or out fight him like Matt, or even out gun him as Frank would definitely do. All she managed to do was deny him with dogged inflexibility like a lock denies the wrong key. 

“Do you know what Wilson Fisk is going to do to you?” he said, a sigh trailing his question.

She rested her forehead against the desk, gaining her bearings for a scant few seconds. “I don’t care what he does to me. I’m not selling my friend to slaughter.”

“He’s a big man with a penchant for violence. Loves to use his hands. Lester, give Ms. Page a little preview of Wilson Fisk’s methods.”

A hand clamped around the front of her throat, flinging her onto her back with brutal thump of shoulders slamming hard oak. Thumbs pressed her windpipe, choking off her air supply in a way that shouldn’t be familiar except it’d happened once before. Another time Wilson Fisk tried to have her killed. Instead of a scratchy jailhouse blanket, naked fingers clasped her neck and squeezed, reducing the world to a muddled vignette of panic and that ghastly, bedeviled smile at the center of it.

She groped his unrelenting forearms and down his flank, vainly attempting to push him off her. What was the use? His muscles might as well be slender coils of steel sinew for what they felt like beneath her floundering fingertips. Aside from compact muscle and body armor, her frantic touch brushed something smooth, cold and metal.

Batons. Holstered batons at his hips exactly like Matt’s. If she was going to get out of this in relatively one piece, this was her out. In one fluid movement, she slid the baton from the hip holster and cocked it back.

The costume looked identical, but the material was nowhere near as durable as whatever Matt’s suit was composed of. She slammed the club home on the side of the impostor’s head, crumpling the rigid material. Her assailant crashed onto the desktop next to her and slid lax upon the shard-littered floor, out cold. 

Rinehart spun around at the commotion. Face inhuman in its naked malevolence, he snarled at Karen and grabbed for the club. There was no where to go but hoist herself atop the desk. Oh God, if he was able to get the baton away from her, she was dead. Her mind screamed to get him away through any means. In pure instinct, she kicked out. Her four inch heels planted on his chest and pushed outward before she remembered the void that laid behind him.

The broad man uttered an inchoate noise of surprise, a sort of harsh gasp as his feet stumbled backward with no floor to bare him. The last she saw of Dr. Ludwig Rinehart, he watched her with bug-eyed shock and toppled into oblivion. His lonely scream fizzled to silence, carried away on the howling wind. 

She didn’t scream. At least Karen couldn’t recall if she had. In fact, she may have blanked out for an indeterminate span of minutes. The wind chilled her through her clothes, but icy dismay rimed her marrow.

Oh God, she did it again. 

She killed someone.

Karen gawked, stupefied through the grey tinged stupor to a cityscape which had been enchanting moments earlier. Now the enchantment was broken. She saw for what it truly was, a gleaming maw open and waiting to swallow her whole. All her emotions purged in a single, disjointed wave and she scrabbled backwards, away from the ravenous heights and toppled back first off the desk. Berber carpet rose up to break her fall. Her elbows took the brunt of the plunge with her head thudding in a faint knock to daze her anew. 

The world gradually wove back together. Gingerly, her heels bore her unsteady weight. She may have struggled to walk, but her mind was apt enough to have her wipe her prints of the club before she let it fall to the floor, to smudge whatever had been on the desk. In some detached sense of logic, she fished her phone from her purse and called Matt. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t spoken in almost six months.

He’d know what to do. He had too know.


	2. Intruders in the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Punisher gets territorial.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gore Trigger Warning ahead!!!! If you wish to avoid anything gory, skip down past the breaker line.

The Punisher dreamed of a dead man's recitations, echoed in the dilapidated shelter of his memory. Violent flashbacks eddied in the bombast of mortar or the hollow pop of distant gunfire. The thunderclap of his own gun exploded with every squeeze of the trigger, jolting recoil through his arm, his shoulder numb before it ached like a prizefighter’s punch. His shadowy enemies screamed in a world of sirocco and sand, the arid wind stifling all other scents except the spent carbon of gunpowder and his own potent sweat. 

He is over there. He was always over there in the Punisher’s dreams.

But there was no _over there_ for him anymore. _Over there_ was another man’s nightmare.

Opposed to the unlimited army of ghostly soldiers, Frank Castle's dreams were quaintly horrific.

Regardless of how many times he drove past the charred rubble, he always ended up back home in the impossibility of dream. Some dogged nerve cluster in his brain asserted that home wasn’t a hollow foundation cratered in the green lawn. That all he held dear wasn’t ash scattered to the wind. Shit, why couldn’t the bullet have obliterated _that_ particular part of his cerebral cortex? 

For as many times as he plummeted into this domestic nightmare, the house always looked identical to the last time he saw it. The last time he sit in a house that had never been so still. A house with no right to belong to anyone else. He doused the place in gasoline and burned the remainder of his humanity in the flames. 

Except now the blue plates were laden with a home cooked meal. Seats arranged around the dinner table, no longer empty. She sat across from him while the kids sat across from each other the way household routine tended to settle in patterns. 

They’re here but the unearthly stillness remained. He’d lost their voices already. Mouths moved in silence, upturn with mimed laughter, purse around unheard conversations. Maria spoke to him and he had no fucking clue what she said. If he read her eyes right, it was her usual chiding. He forgot to change the burnt out bulb in the upstairs hallway. He spilled oil in the garage again. He drank an entire six pack last night. _Do you know what happens to people who drink alone?_ Fuck, he’d give several feet of his large intestine to hear her bitching at him again. Now he could drink alone all he wanted, could soak his cement floor to an oil slick, and let every bulb burn out one by one. 

_Lucky you_ the cold voice needled at the back of his skull.

But he sat at that dinner table to his old life on mute. He’d done so before and he’s do so again with a masochist’s resolve. And maybe sometimes he tricked himself into believing the lie, believing he can stay here. Then the bullets slam through the bay window at his back, whizzed over his shoulders and pulverized his family to bloody pieces. In horrific indifference, they continue their dinner. Half-unhinged jaws chew mashed potatoes. Arterial spray painted the cheery beige walls. Lisa pointed at her brother, laughing, or at least he assumed because a bullet blew off some of her fingers while another lodged into the side of her skull. 

Frank opened his mouth to scream but it came out quiet, the anguish and raw pain smothered in his throat. Even he had no voice here. Here in this world of bullet hail and unseen snipers…

* * *

The alarm’s shrill litany knocked him awake. Frank greeted the intrusion with a hearty gasp. He lurched up, his heart lodged in his throat and a floe of sweat beaded his forehead. Night pushed in through the gaps in the blinds but he found himself alone. Max, his squat canine body a shadow in the dark, loped a wary circuit around the room’s perimeter. Blue light pulsed a warning on his desk, out of reach on the other side of the room. _Secondary alarm at another safe-house. Good._ The alert could wait a few minutes. A lucky break given he struggled to get enough air in his lungs let alone defend himself. Bleary eyed, he squinted at his wristwatch. 

1:23 in the morning.

_That's what you get for trying to sleep at night like a normal person._

He threw his legs over the cot, his bare feet chilled by bare floor boards beneath. Max’s paws clicked as he trotted over and sat on the floor beside Frank’s spartan bed. Somehow the dog understood the blue light ranked low priority as well. Instead of barking his head off, the hound regarded his troubled partner with a curious tilt of his head.

“Believe me, buddy. You don’t wanna know,” he said and rubbed rough sleep from his sweaty brow.

After calibrating his panic, Frank rose with a stretch, twisting kinks and stiffness from his knotty muscles. Usually he performed a quick pushup regimen straight out of bed. Not just fitness, but a drill to get the blood pumping, to clear his head. But his blood had only just eased from hammering in his temples, and no amount of exercise could wipe his mental slate clean. He stalked towards the desk that served as his makeshift CIC. The nightmare receded with each step but its pollution lingered. Shrapnel of grisly fragments stuck in him, embedding deeper after every ill gotten attempt at sleep. At this rate, he might as well quit any hope for a conventional sleep cycle and return to micro naps. Black coffee and busy hands. Who needed sleep?

With that godawful alarm finally shut off, the air-conditioner’s whine supplied the requisite amount of white noise to keep him from going insane. The monitor screen blipped on, a blaring gleam in his unadjusted eyes. Messages popped up from Micro but Frank minimized them. Nothing that couldn’t wait. Ah, there it was. Someone tripped his safehouse alarm in Hell’s Kitchen. Just what he needed. The Punisher stepped to bat, frothing at the mouth to turn some unlucky assholes’s night into absolute bedlam. 

_Maybe there’s was more than one intruder._ Frank reasoned.

 _Then maybe it’d be a massacre._ The Punisher smiled back. It wasn’t a nice smile. It never was.

At least the prowlers were smart enough to disable his surveillance cameras so he had no fucking clue what he walked into.

He rose from the swivel chair, the spring back in his step as strode into the bathroom. Call him cruel, but the prospect of spilling a scumbag’s blood usually lightened Frank’s mood. He flicked on the light and immediately regretted his decision. Dingy fluorescent light bleached the color from his face. Hollows sank deeper and his scruffy cheek was nearly as dark as the bruise staining his chest. He patted the ugly green contusion. The ache had finally subsided, but it served as a hallmark to his own sloppiness. Also a reminder that center mass torso was as good as gospel for some triggermen. Fortunately, his flak jacket took the brunt of the shot. Knocked the breath right out of his lungs and gave him a sizable lump that took weeks to shrink, but he walked away from it. The other guy hadn’t. Gospel ain’t always right. Shitbag should’ve gone for the head.

Frank leaned towards the mirror, dragged his fingers through sleep mussed hair with a analytical squint. Shit, he needed to buzz it down again. Compromised safehouse a greater concern than his hairstyle, he splashed lukewarm water on his face from a hissing tap. The water ran slightly colder when he cupped some in his palms and slurped it down. Coolness coated the empty bowl of his stomach. When was the last time he ate?

Frank dressed in his black BDUs and a matching shirt. He grabbed the first can he spied, indifferent to its contents as he pulled the tab and shoveled food in his mouth. Beans or hash, what did it matter? Not like he savored the taste of food anymore. Eating degenerated into a mechanical ritual reserved solely for self-preservation. He neglected to even heat the meal up half the time. A bullet in his skull hadn’t put him down, what was uncooked canned food going to do? 

Max sat dutifully and watched Frank lace on his boots and finish strapping on the remainder of his gear. He armed himself in the ritual diligence of a Catholic priest donning his sacred vestment. And why shouldn’t he? Both exacted penance and listened to final prayers. In his purely secular practice, he treated his gear as hallowed as any miter or cassock. Everything from the folded knives concealed in his coat to the armored flak vest buckled across his chest. His holsters cinched around his thigh, waist, and shoulders, their guns a comforting weight, his mind an unruly burden.

Before he left, he spooned out some wet dog food for Max, noting that it looked unsettlingly similar to the food he’d just downed. Well. Fuck. At least he sprang for the good shit as far as Max’s menu was concerned.

“Fort Castle’s now under your command, bud.”

Max blinked his wet round eyes and made a snarfling noise.

“I stand relieved,” he said and shut the door behind him. The security system armed itself.

Frank stepped into a breathless summer night, the air so clogged with humidity he nearly choked on it. The nearby waste water treatment plant spewed the stench that kept Hunt’s Point safe from gentrification. It may have smelled like a poorly dug latrine, but at least people left him alone out here. Deplorable safety. Grimy local color. A few incentives for settling in this section of the city. The rest of New York was either too frou frou or too densely populated. Here, his red-bricked warehouse stood cheek-by-jowl with hundreds of fraternal twin factory buildings, all crammed across the extensive industrial sprawl. Urban camouflage.

He scrunched his nose as he caught another whiff of something foul. Trash night in the Bronx. Another disgusting nuance in this June night’s medley of scents. Rotten vapor clung to the back of his throat like it slathered there. He spit to rid the rancid taste from his mouth. 

Fuck. He forgot his coffee thermos. Oh, these motherfuckers were dead now.

The truck’s dashboard clock turned over to 2:01 AM as he arrived at his Hell’s Kitchen safe house. The deceptive entrance recessed into a building constantly between tenants. This month the storefronts housed a hookah bar and an all night noodle shop. It only took a few hours of eavesdropping on loose-lipped patrons to discover the hookah bar was a brothel and the noodle shop a drug trafficking front. Frank saved the noodle shop for a slow night. He didn’t give a shit about brothels so long as the girls were there of their own volition.

Lincoln Tunnel’s traffic reverberated up into his boots. The air was just as oppressive here as it had been in the Bronx, but at least it smelled nicer. Nicer meaning that instead of an overflowing head, this particular block reeked of the Port Authority’a stale bus emissions and heated rubber. New York City never slept and neither did the endless stream of cars and buses pumping in and out the city like a hemorrhaging life essence. Frank wielded that kinetic tide, hid himself beneath it’s ceaseless rush.

Micro found the place for him. Micro found most of his places for him. Some algorithmic, heat map techno babble bullshit. Whatever. Was it secure and would people leave him the fuck alone? That’s all he cared about. This specific safe house was a defunct utility station lost in the shuffle between terror attacks. Frank quietly claimed the musty substation, stocked it with moisture-proofed munitions crates, a meager armory, and a security system. Figures the one safehouse that got broken into had nothing worth stealing. _Then why are you bothering to haul ass down here and smoke out the rats?_ With everything else in his life taken from him, Frank tended to get a bit territorial. 

The door to his subterranean shelter recessed into the grubby brick facade, its metal face dented and flecked with old graffiti. It was ajar.

Frank thought back to the nightmare he’d awoke from, letting fury wash over him, settling in his stomach like molten lead. Without this anger, he succumbed to apathy, and succumbing to apathy meant he’d end up dead. 

He descended in a sub-level drenched in darkness. His prowlers cut the jerry-rigged electrical line powered with stolen electricity. Shit. Not just an intrusion, but a goddamn ambush. He dug out his night vision goggles from his leather trench and gazed into an infrared world painted in lime greens shades on a black canvas. His assault rifle muzzle raised, aim true, ready to unload into the first tango foolish enough to overestimate his mettle or underestimate the accuracy of Frank’s shooting. 

But in lieu of a spook deathsquad or stupidly ambitious hit men, he found the Devil himself waiting, shrouded in the hellacious murk of the muggy substructure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I struggled with this chapter. Between appointments and social outings, I dragged out the prose in Scrivner as if I had been scouring off skin. Typically I can churn out a few chapters a week but this one was stubborn for whatever reason. And all these scenes just to eventually get Frank and Karen back in the same room! Why?! Why am I such a stickler for plot?!


	3. The Devil and Frank Castle

“You lost, Red? Get you own fucking lair. This one’s taken.”

The horned man stood still in that faintly slumped posture, arms at his sides, gaze pinned on Frank despite the blackout. “I need a favor.”

“Favor? I’m already doin’ you a favor by not shootin’ your ass where you stand.”

“Go on. Pound your chest. Show your teeth. But I didn’t come here to lock horns with you.”

“Good. I left my horns at home. Don’t look as good on me as they do on you. Clashes with my tactical gear.”

“Goddammit, Frank. I'm asking for your help, not your banter.”

Frank lowered his gun, a modified M4 carbine he’d been raring to hear bellow in the tight space. No such luck. Yet. “We’ve been over this already. Our methods aren’t compatible. Yours go to the hospital, mine to morgue. So unless I get to cross some scumbags permanently off the docket, I ain’t interested, Red. Go back to perching on roofs and micromanaging the shit out of the same neighborhood like you do every night.”

“It concerns a mutual friend.”

“Bullshit. I don’t have friends.” He waved his hand and had already begun to walk away. 

He heard the Devil’s clenched fists squeak. “Karen Page.”

Frank rounded to face him, heart sunk in his stomach like a cinderblock. He growled, because if he didn’t growl than he’d sound panicked. “Karen Page? What happened to Karen?”

“Figures.” The Devil patronized him with an incredulous shake of his horned head. “She’s fine. At least physically. But there was an incident earlier tonight and…” The words seemed to cling to the other man’s tongue for dear life. “She needs someone to talk too.”

Frank glanced down his black emblazoned tactical vest and gun holsters. “Do I look like a shrink to you, Red?”

“No, but you might be the only person in this city she’ll listen too.” His strange red eyes skewered him and Frank stifled the corresponding shudder. What was up with his eyes? He never quite pinpointed it, but the Devil’s gaze always traced an icy finger down his spine. It wasn’t right. Nothing about it felt right. He honed in on Frank’s position despite the visibility being as clear as oil on ink.

“And why should I care?”

A husky chuckle grated up the Devil’s scratchy throat. “Are you really going to play the dejected loner card? Do us both a favor. Don’t. I know you care about her. I know you care what happens to her. Any other sentiment is just a bald faced lie. And a bad one at that.”

“Just cause you charmed a few sob stories outta me don’t make you a mind reader,” he growled and swallowed the urge to rip the night vision goggles off his face and leave. Yet Frank refused to give up the ghost on this one. “She send you to look for me?”

“No. Opposite actually. She refuses to speak to anyone. She’s currently holed up in her apartment beneath her covers, inconsolable.” 

“What happened?” Every question buried him deeper. 

“It’s complicated. More complicated by the hour.”

“Enlighten me.”

The Devil eased out measured exhale, his mouth twisted before he spoke the words. “She killed someone. Or at least at least she _claims_ to have killed someone.”

Frank’s brows furrowed as low as the goggles allowed. “Claimed? You either smoke someone or don’t, Red.”

“Habeus corpus. Except there’s no corpse.”

Frank shifted his weight from one foot to the other. _What shit did you step in this time, Irish?_

“Alright. So she may have plugged someone and the body’s already gone. I make the bodies, I typically don’t dispose of them. I’m not a vulture. She sure the tango was down for good? Might have crawled away. Shit, might have hopped away on one leg for all the tweaked out fuckers I’ve dealt with lately.”

“Let me just review the stenographer’s record.” The Devil spoke, his irritation bending the steel in his voice. “Look, I coaxed as much information as I could from a woman teetering between shock and sobbing. She said she pushed a man out of a 46th floor window, but strange thing is there’s no body on the street. There’s also another man she clobbered in the head, unconscious when she left him and vanished when we returned to the scene.”

“Spooky.” Frank attempted to diffuse his own nerves with humor, but his fingers twitched restlessly at his side.”

“She refuses to talk to me, to let me help her in the way she needs because…” he looked down, away for the first time since he’s laid sight on Frank. “She says I’m incapable of understanding what she’s going through because I’ve never killed anyone. So being you are…well-versed in such an area, thought you could lend your expertise.”

A sinner’s empathy stacked against a saint’s judgement. Now _that_ he understood. 

“C’mon.” Frank acquiesced and strode towards the bottom landing. “We’ll continue this rendezvous topside.”

The Devil made no further comment. He moved soundlessly at Frank’s back and followed him up the two flights of stairs, his footsteps barely scuffing the treads. Why did it bother him? Weren’t they both creatures of the dark?

“By the way,” Frank spoke over his shoulder. “You’re an asshole for cutting my electric. Now I gotta re-run the wire.”

“Shouldn’t be piggybacking off other people utilities in the first place.” The Devil admonished from the all consuming dark behind his back. 

“Shit, now your cracking down on utility fraud. What next? Going door-to-door and check for bum cable boxes? Pirated TV programs? I hear that medieval show is back on the air. The one with the dragons, and snow zombies, and lots of naked chicks.” Frank snapped his fingers but the name refused to come to him. Ironic given Micro never shut up about the damn show. “The one everyone watches but no one pays for. Plenty of people for an upstanding alter boy such as yourself to wag a finger at. Are you even allowed to watch that show, Red? Or do you have to ask your parents first?”

A reluctant chuckle pierced the black stillness behind him. “Can’t say I missed your particular brand of deprecating humor, Frank.”

“Gotta get my punches in somehow.” 

Topside greeted them with a stuffy bluster of fresh air, air as fresh as it get on nights like this. Streetlights flashed in white searing orbs in a blown out world tinted green. Frank cursed. He wrenched off the night vision goggles and rubbed the spots from his eyes. The Devil failed to show any adverse reaction to the abrupt change of lighting. So no built in night vision then. Unless he had a way to calibrate it? Too many goddamn questions.

“So Karen’s at her place then.” His key jingled the car door lock and dumped his M4 in the back seat.

“Last I place I left her. Doubt she got far even if she regained the will to leave her bed.” The Devil turned, heading towards a dumpster beneath a conveniently placed fire escape ladder. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Roof jumping? Why waste of time since we’re heading the same place? Let me give you a lift.”

The Devil faced him, his strange gaze flicked between Frank and the beat up truck. “You can’t be serious. The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen carpooling with the Punisher?” 

“Get in the damn truck, Red.” Frank smacked the dinged hood a few times. “Not like I’m gonna charge you gas money.” 

This had to be the strangest car ride Frank had ever taken, and this coming from a guy who routinely had bound people slung across his back seat. The two of them, driver and shotgun, dressed in full gear as though they were heading to a fucking Halloween party. Frank plucked a to-go coffee cup of indeterminate age from the center console and shook it. Without further consideration, he downed the remainder in a single gulp, its lukewarm contents and bitter grit coating his gullet. When he came to a stoplight, he tossed the empty cup into a curbside trashcan.

“Hey, baby!” called a scantly clad woman who certainly wasn’t standing on a street corner at 2:20 AM for her own amusement. “I got a red wig and black vinyl bodysuit back at my place! We swing by there and I’ll be your Black Widow. Do you two separately or both at once. Same price either way.”

Frank’s shoulders shook with stifled laughter. A laughter which almost erupted as the horned alter boy slumped into the seat, as though wished he could disappear.

Frank gave the woman a lopsided smirk. “No thanks, sweetheart. My buddy’s a little shy. You stay safe out here, alright?”

The woman of the night blew him a kiss. “Be here for another hour in case you change your mind, Pun.”

Traffic light changed, the truck rolled through the intersection and he made a left. “God I love this crazy fucking city sometimes.”

The Devil answered him with an aggrieved grunt.

They rode on another block before Frank broke the silence. “So…how do you have the pleasure of knowing Ms. Page? Or do you just have a soft spot for pretty, emotionally compromised blondes?”

“Wilson Fisk took an interest in her awhile back. Anything that interests Wilson Fisk also interests me.”

Frank’s knuckles whitened on the battered steering wheel. Fisk? What the hell did a bigtime scumbag like Fisk have to do with someone like Karen?”

“Mind filling me in on the details of Fisk’s interest?”

The Devil huffed. “Ask Ms. Page. Not my story to tell.”

Frank pursed his lips, drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, his nerves buzzing in his chest like a prodded hornet’s nest. He’d been as calm as a tombstone descending into that darkness, hazy on the threat lying in wait. The cold unflappability of a career soldier. Kevlar wrapped balls of iron. But every block closer to Karen’s apartment unraveled something, tangled him up when he tried to knot it back together. A leggy blonde reporter afflicted him where a phantom wetworks squad scarcely got his heart rate up. Her warmth burned him and her tenacity grated his own, tectonic plates grinding one another until his world shook.

 _Which is exactly why you ought to be driving in the exact opposite direction,_ the Punisher suggested from the icy cavern where Frank kept him. 

_Right. Turn chicken. Run. Run from the woman that weathered your bullshit and baggage. Who never gave up on you when you gave up on yourself. Piece of shit coward._ Frank growled at his inner detractor who wanted him flayed of all those pesky human attributes. 

Mind outpacing his body, he returned to twisting the steering wheel in hands that knew a little less of being gentle with each passing day. 

If his passenger detected his agitation, the Devil said nothing of it. 

Frank found parking down the street, her apartment building visible just past the scaffolding of another building’s facade renovation. They both got out of the truck.

“Take it this little visit is going to be chaperoned,” Frank said as he watched the other man, the car hood between them. 

Distance and metal between them, he felt the other man bristle. “I’m not going up with you, if that’s what your insinuating.”

Frank huffed. “Yeah, you know if I had less faith in your story, I’d think you were walking me into an ambush.”

“And for what reason would I do that, Frank?” 

“You went through all this trouble to get my attention. Waited almost an hour in the dark in musty, stuffy utility basement just to send me to chat with a woman who’s no more than _Wilson’s Fisk’s interest_ to you. Something stinks like concealed shit, Red. You holding out on me?”

“Maybe this isn’t the first time I’ve rescued Ms. Page.”

“Rescued,” Frank said, mock and scorn twined around the single word. “She felt the need to cap someone, Red. Sounds like you were a little late on the draw there.”

“Don’t going laying the blame at my feet. You weren’t there either.”

“Because maybe I believe Ms. Page is a perfectly capable woman who can take care of herself.”

“A perfectly capable target when the Blacksmith was taking shots at her. That was one of yours, right?” 

“And I dealt with it. Dealt with the Blacksmith with more finality than just sending him to jail. You handed Fisk a fully manned fortress, yeah? Look at you. Supposed to be so goddamn smart, but you sent a notorious kingpin to Riker’s so he can contaminate another organization, bring it to heel with greased palms and brute force. Good job, Red.” 

“I’m working on it,” the other man said and walked around the truck to stand on the curb.

“Well, fuck! You’re working on it. Giving it the ol’ college try while Fisk’s tentacles slink through the streets and rebuilds his empire of white collar crime flecked with blood. ”

“You said yourself, it only takes one to cross that line and there’s no going back.” 

“I’m not telling you to kill him. I’d do that myself if cared enough to sneak back in Riker’s. But there’s another way to gentle a rabid dog without pulling an Old Yeller. Guy’s gotta have a weakness. A bum knee to break, to cripple him.” 

“And exploiting that weakness only sets off the domino fall of misery and suffering. If I break the ice beneath Fisk’s feet, he’ll drag down whomever he can grab into the drowning depths with him. Even if _someone_ were to infiltrate Riker’s and kill him, the sword of Damocles is set and ready to fall, ready to behead too many people I care about.”

“Damocles? Which Avenger is that?” Frank said, the shit-eating smile curling the corner of his lip. “I’m guessing he’s the hammer guy’s partner.”

“While you crack jokes and compare vendettas, Karen is going through hell less a block away. Did you come to help or were you wasting my time?”

A twinge of remorse curdled his smirk. Maybe he was acting like an inopportune jackass while Karen suffered. Getting Red’s lather up, while amusing to Frank, in no way benefitted her. Not like she was there to see it. If all else failed, he’d definitely tell her the Black Widow hooker story.

“Right. Yeah. See you around, Red. Hopefully not too soon.” Frank was about to lock up the truck before the Devil interrupted him.

“You’re going to talk to her dressed like that?” His eerie gaze swept over Frank and his exposed mouth twitched in either humor or a disdain. Hard to tell without a read on the eyes.

“Ain’t that rich coming from you, Red? Cause maybe you haven’t looked in the mirror tonight, but you look just a smidge intimidating. Downright demonic even.” 

“All I’m asking is for you to talk to her. Not extract her from a combat zone teeming with insurgents. Lose the guns.”

A rough chuckle rumbled up from his chest. The balls on this guy to tell him to lose his weapons. Frank didn’t go anywhere without his guns these days, but the more he reflected on it, the more sensible it sounded. He had his knives and could stow a pistol in his belt. Alright. Maybe the Punisher had to sit this one out. And here’s Frank Castle stepping up to the plate after being benched for the entire season. 

“Ah, Red,” he spoke as he unbuckled his thigh holster. “If this turns out to be some sort of trap to get rid of me once and for all, know that your head will be the first I come to collect.” 

“Noted.” The Devil stalked off, waved his hand in the air. The red suit melted into a dark alley as the night welcomed back one of her favorite sons. “Thanks for the lift, Frank.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Frank is fun to write, but I'm switching back to Karen's POV next chapter!


	4. Sanctuary

Wind no longer buffeted her face but her throat ached, the chafed skin throbbed with every harried heartbeat. Her memory offered up a spotty recollection when she tried to remember exactly what had happened. Somehow how she’d retreated to an off-suite stairwell, alone in the dark with phone in hand. Matt’s voice supplied a dialogue of sanity. She talked on and on until she her voice went from high and panicked to choppy and hoarse. The tight concrete corridor ricocheted Karen’s words as she asked questions to no one in particular. Was the faux-Devil alive? Was he dead? Should she go back in there and bludgeon him again? 

Karen nearly jumped out of her skin when the voice on the phone emerged as a voice in the shadows. 

“It’s you,” she said, voice brittle as her tenuous hold on her sanity. Her shoulder blades brushed the cool concrete and she continued to press the phone to her ear despite the ended call. “It’s really you? Not..whoever the hell that psychopath was.”

“The other guy’s still conked out on the floor.” The familiar scratchy voice softened, implored. Matt’s voice through the Devil’s mouth. He held out the identical mask, much like his own save for the bashed temple and shattered right lens. “First designer purses and now vigilante body armor. People counterfeit cheap knock-offs of everything these days.” 

She’d never thought she’d be so glad to see the Devil come for her.

And just like that, the span of conflicted months closed like a sutured wound. His hands cupped her jaw, dredging her from stupor and ushering Karen back to the reality whence she drifted. 

“Karen, you have to tell me exactly what happened. Certain parts of your story aren’t adding up.”

“What?” she blinked, her eyes dry from staring into space. “What do you mean not adding up? I killed someone. I might have killed two someones.” She shook her head, processing what Matt had just said with the speed of a one winged carrier pigeon. “Conked out? So he’s still alive?” 

A convex skein of light caught in the Devil’s inset glass lenses. “He’s breathing. If I weren’t a good Catholic boy, he’d wouldn’t be breathing much longer. If it’s any consolation, he’s and ugly son of bitch with a questionable taste in tattoos.” He tilted her head back, his sightless gaze surveying what felt like a ripened necklace of bruising on her neck. “Though there’s nothing stopping me from going back in there and giving him another kick to head. It’d be worth another decade of the rosary.”

“And the other guy…Dr Ludwig or whoever the fuck he really is…did you see him on the street?”

He licked his lips, Matt’s distinctive mouth parted as it always did when something addled him. How had she missed all these clues? “You pushed him out the window?”

She nodded, his tender grip permitting the gesture. 

He blew a breath through his lips, his hands dropped to his waist. “Karen, I don’t know how else to tell you this, but there’s no body.”

“Then he must have hit some overhang or awning or…” A cryptic panic surged up from grief’s depths.

“All I sensed was fresh blood and glass shards on the street below. No tracks or signs of a body being dragged away.”

She laughed. Cackled if she were honest with her vocabulary.

By the time the conversation took its eighth orbit around this evening’s events, the faux Devil had also disappeared into thin air because nothing in her life could ever be that simple, could it? Matt stalked the room, searching for traces of the other man while simultaneously erasing Karen’s tracks. They left down the stairwell as the cops headed up in the elevator, according to Matt’s word anyway. Sure enough, red and blue lights flashed on the storefront windows around the corner where the emergency exit them let out. That small, morbid curiosity prodded her to go look. To see the missing body, to ensure this wasn’t some bizarre claim Matt conceived to leaven the weight of her sin. 

As always, appeasing her curiosity posed it’s own threats. Ludwig must have kept some kind of schedule. Wouldn’t take an ace inspector to place her on a patient list even if tonight’s meeting was off the books. _Yes, officer, I was coincidentally strolling around this section of the city when my shrink met a dubious, maybe bloody end._ Before she made her own mistakes, Matt plied her shock dulled wits and led her away by the arm, guiding her down an alley and into the subterranean garage levels below. 

Things grew hazy again. She blanked out most of the drive back to her place. Obviously she’d made it back in one piece. Was Matt there in the car? Ah, yes. Sitting in the passenger side sans mask and newly donned glasses. She found the spectacle of him half-stripped out of his Devil costume amusing. Funny in the same way looney people found cracks in walls hilarious. The mussy hair and button-down shirt paired with armored pants had her in stitches. Mania ebbed back to numbness once she drove towards her apartment. 

“We ought to head back to my place,” he advised, his tone that of Matt instead of the Devil, as though his voice was sanded down and polished. “At least until we know what’s going on. Verify that this Dr Rinehart is truly dead. Until then, I want to keep an eye on you.”

There went crazy pants Karen laughing again through the icy sheen of her shock. 

“Keep an eye on me,” she wheezed, huddled over the steering wheel. 

“Karen, I’m serious. We have one guy in the wind and other either dead or missing.”

“He’s dead.” Her voice trembled on an overstrung suspension chord. “He has to be dead. I killed him. He fell forty stories and hit the street. You sensed the shards and blood yourself. Of course he’s dead.” 

“But the body…”

“Disappeared. Got it. Stranger things have disappeared which have connections to William Fisk. He’s dead.”

“Would it be easier for you that way?” He tried to clip the pompous judgement from his voice, he really tried.

“Yes!” She yelled over the engine’s hum. “Maybe…oh God. I don’t know.” She shook her head, tears burning her eyes and slender fingers white knuckled on the steering wheel. A culpable lump waxed at the base of her bruised throat and her vision bled grey at the corners. “How about you not upset me while I’m driving before I crash and kill us both as well?” 

“My place is closer.” Matt proposed again. 

She attempted a joke but the words ground between her teeth. “And how many women am I going to find in your bed this time?”

“Karen, that wasn’t what it looked—“

“No! You’d just _prefer_ I believe you cheated on me rather than own up to your other nocturnal activities. Don’t, Matt. Just don’t. Not right now. I’m wrungout, exhausted, my nerves are beyond rattled and I think I have blood spatter on my dry clean only shirt. I need to go home. It’s all I can do just to stay afloat in the past six months of bullshit. Sure, my apartment’s been shot up and broken into, but it’s still the closest place I have to a sanctuary.”

Right about now, her sanctuary ought to come with barred windows and a fully stocked bar. Her place had neither of those luxuries. Things got spotty again in the poor frequency of her memory. Matt continued to shadow her as she locked the car and ascended her four story walk-up. She couldn’t recall inviting him in, but she definitely asked him to get her more liquor. An excuse along the lines of _not having enough booze to deal with this shit_ passed through her lips.

Ever the good Catholic boy, he refused her request. She might have yelled at him after that. At the very least acted crossly and clipped the conversation short by powering on her AC window unit. The fan stuttered on and droned in the closed room’s stuffy heat. This was when she blanked out again. There, sitting on her bed, her head cradled in her hands like it was about to fall off at the shoulders. The front door closed and she was finally alone.

What little left of her composures ripped at poorly sewn seams. She was _alone_ again, allowed to fly apart in the comfort of her own solitude. Karen hastily tore off the shirt stained with another man’s blood and dumped it in the waste can. No sense in cleaning it. Not like she’d ever be able to wear it again. The grey nail polish she wore the night she shot Wesley met the same fate. In the trash can. She tried to use that nail polish once more, but all she saw were her fingers wrapped around Wesley’s shiny Taurus 9mm. The ghost of recoil shot up her arm, her finger squeezed the trigger over and over as bullets slammed into his chest like shooting a sand bag. Now, in the horror of memory, a sluggish dribble of crimson blood trickled off the Devil’s mask, stained on her recollection as blood stained that shirt. Did they make stain remover for the mind? 

She poured a meager two fingers of mid-shelf whiskey, all the stingy bottle had left to give. With the way her life routinely went to shit, she really ought to keep another bottle stashed in the dresser for nights like these.

_Yeah, let’s keep it next to the gun. An upgrade from grandma’s trusted baking cabinet stash. This is the life you made for yourself, Karen. .380 and a bottle of Wild Turkey tucked right next to your unmentionables._

She tossed back the highball glass in one shot. The whiskey’s golden heat burned down her throat and formed a nice warm pool at the pit of her stomach. A few stray drop trickled from her chin and she collected them, licked the remnants from the back of her palm. It wasn’t enough. She needed to drink until the room spun, until alcohol dropped her into blessed oblivion where maybe her problems might resolve themselves by morning. 

Her heels came off followed by her pantyhose and skirt. Misery drained the willpower to take a shower, to scour her skin clean beneath scalding water the way she couldn’t do with her conscience. Trauma had made a child of her again. She cowered beneath her counterpane, hidden, as if her problems were boogeymen thwarted by a few yards of batting and floral fabric.

How could she have been so stupid? Yes, Karen, this kindly psychiatrist just happened to run into you at a party. He also agreed to work pro bono because doctors in fancy offices are known for their charity like lawyers in big firms are known for their mercy. And that indiscretion ended up with another lethal close call.

At least she concluded so. Not even the lack of body could convince her otherwise. She pushed him, her heels on his chest, the shock plastered on his sallow face as he pitched backwards out the window. These moments had actually happened regardless of where he’d ended up. The man was as good as dead the moment her reflexes aimed to kill him.

The problem with walking through hell wasn’t trudging forward. Hell’s greatest temptation was stifling the urge to look back and see how far you’ve trekked. Because once you looked back, another piece of you stayed there. And Karen kept looking glancing over her shoulder.

Sleep offered no refuge. Phantom claws dragged her back through the hellscape of her night, summoned fleeting instances of broken glass and constricted air flow as if her mind dedicated itself to her agony. Tonight’s calamity fused with past terrors. Her father’s face imposed on the faux-Devil’s, his fingers banding her neck. Or her brother’s young eyes, blue like her own, rounded in fright as Kevin plummeted out the window, his hand always just out of reach. Sleep wallowed in fickle tides, only to wash her ashore with the phantom sounds of shattering glass or and wrecked metal. That rural highway in Vermont where everything ended only to begin again. Somewhere in the choppy undercurrent of shallow nightmares, a crisp, precise sound wove into her imagination’s phantom din. 

Karen awoke with a flinch. Her body cleared an impressive few inches of air judging by how hard she hit the mattress. Drowse evaporated, her head shot up from the pillow. Alarm coursed through her blood before she located the clamor’s source. 

_Tap, tap, tap._ chimed from the window beside her bed. 

Well, if someone had come to shoot her, at least they were polite about it this time. Some foolishly opportunistic inner voice advised her to wait it out. Maybe they’d simply go away if she ignored them? Leave a sticky note like a UPS driver. _Sorry we missed you. Will be return at this time to finish you off._

_Tap, tap, tap._ “I know you’re in there, Irish.” 

The Devil had come and gone. Now Death in the flesh rapped on her window.


	5. Confession

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added two chapters back-to-back! Don't miss chapter four!

Frank Castle’s face swam out of the night like a shark behind aquarium glass. Contradictory to the usual reaction such an ominous visit inspired, the knot in her stomach slackened instead purging out that last whiskey shot along with this afternoon’s dinner. She pressed her forehead into the plush coolness of her pillow and drew her first proper breath in the past few hours. 

What does one do when the scariest man this side of death lurks outside your bedroom window? Running, hiding, pleading, trying your best not to piss yourself for dignity’s sake probably topped the list. Yet Karen experienced none of those knee-jerk reactions. Had her instincts short-circuited in tonight’s chaos? No, because instead of blank resignation to doom, she indulged a contrary sense of what she scrabbled to call _relief._

Yep. She was glad to see the Punisher. Her life, specifically her mental health, was in sore need of evaluation. 

That improbable relief quickly waned to annoyance. _Typical Frank._ To pick tonight of all her shitty nights to drop in for a chat.

“Now’s not a good time for a social call,” she muffled into the pillow, her voice scoured raw by sleep and sobbing. 

“Ran into Hell’s Kitchen’s horny red mascot. Told me you could use an ear. C’mon. Let me in. Let’s talk about it.” 

She looked up and through the dingy ambient lit murk of 3AM in the city. Her vision adjusted and the veil of tears withered. Details chiseled from darkness on that face hewn for intimidation. Every angle and contour wrought by a blacksmith’s hammer blows instead of a sculptor's nimble fingers. His face had changed again since the last time. Grief weathered him like patina on a tombstone. Fatigue arced dreary runnels beneath his eyes. At least they weren’t blackened by some erstwhile injury this time. 

He was dismal, dreary as a night that knew no dawn. Yet she still found him as intolerably handsome as ever. Handsome in a boorish mentality that a smart, self-respecting woman wasn’t suppose to fawn over. She was no longer annoyed. Now she was just plain angry.

“Stay away from me,” she commanded in a pathetic whimper without the conviction to back it up. _So that’s what it’s like to be on the other side of those words._

“Right. How bout I’ll cut you a deal? I’ll stay away from you in the same respect that you stayed away from me. Without the late night cop calvary and faked death hoopla of course.”

Either she kept griping at him or started crying again. “Couldn’t use the front intercom like a normal person?”

“Cause it’s too easy to ignore a voice on a speaker. And what’s the point of picking the main door’s lock if you have your apartment’s deadbolt thrown? Then I gotta unscrew the hinges and it ends up a huge mess.” He drummed on the window again, the sharp tap belonging to his glove’s reinforced knuckle. “Now, you gonna open up, or am I gonna have to scale my ass back down four stories and get my glass cutters?”

He’d do it too. Relentless bastard. Do it believing he was acting civil. Glass cutters were considerate compared to the mess of a crowbar or a fist. She strung together the shreds of her composure. Rather than add another repair to her landlord’s running tab, Karen crawled out of her cocoon. The hour she’d slept was enough for the AC to pump arctic levels of cold air into her tiny studio. Shit, it was freezing in here! Beyond the bare window, Frank’s eyebrows hitched upwards by a precise fraction, a mild response translated as shock on his guarded face. 

Oh, that’s right. 

Karen looked down and realized she’d crawled out of bed wearing only the bra and panties she crawled in with. Whoops. She refused to cover herself like some demure damsel. She’d rather her body laid bare than the emotional welter he no doubt came to draw from her like venom out of snake bite. 

Abandoned modesty aside, she skewered him with a scowl so sharp it might have cut its own hole in the glass pane. Just because she let him in didn’t mean she had to play the courteous hostess. Especially since he was probably only here as favor to Matt. Why else had he taken time from his busy _punishing_ schedule to visit her? Karen flicked open the sash locks then slid beneath her comforter, receiving her uninvited guest with little more than an annoyed frown and a turned back. 

Frank met her disdain with his own particular brand of detachment. No smart-ass comments made about the chill or her state of undress. Within reach but ever as reclusive. Heavy, sour heat poured in and the cold air drained out. The large man stirred little noise, barely a rustle of clothes or the squeak of leather as he maneuvered through the opening. Could he move in complete silence if he wanted? A ghost dressed in black fatigues and the harbinger of death. Frank Castle was fodder for a new urban legends. 

She’d yanked the covers over her head when she heard the window close, the gentle click of the sash locks fastening and locking them both in and the rest of the world out. _You’re suppose to keep the wolves outside, Karen dear. Not lock them in with you._ the gentle voice of her old Irish grandmother chided. 

Frank lingered beside her bed, his cool stare chilling an ice patch on her back. The empty whiskey bottle scraped across her nightstand as he picked it up. Dregs delicately tinkled when he gave the bottle an appraising shake. Karen felt his gaze change, turn flintier, knew his brows lowered over the broken nose bridge. He crouched by the bed and sniffed the air. 

“I’m not drunk, Frank. There was only enough left for one drink and the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen doesn’t do liquor runs,” she muttered from her haven beneath the comforter.

She heard him grunt and place the bottle back where he got it. In an act which must be ritual, he paced the room’s perimeter, checking window locks, fastening the front door’s deadbolt, even ducking his head into her bathroom to hunt for whatever interloper the Punisher anticipated in a single woman’s studio apartment. Rusted illumination of the orange streetlights didn’t quite reach him there, yet he ignored the light switch. Frank walked in shadow like he owned the darkness. Then the heavy tread of his footfalls diverted, wandered towards the wall opposite her bed. She doubted the shabby chic decor—rendered shabbier by Blacksmith’s assault—intrigued the Punisher. Especially not when crude scabs of spackle patched bullet holes in the spaces between her reframed and rehung pictures

“Shit. No wonder you didn’t want me making more work for the repairman. A drunk monkey could do a better job,” he remarked.

“Have to get their practice in somewhere,” she muttered and curled up tighter. “And not all of us are DIY adept.”

“You did this?”

“Either I patched it or it was another job that was never getting done.” She peeked at him over the comforter hem. Darkness reduced Frank to little better than a man shaped shadow in her unlit room. “Are you here to snipe about my shoddy repair work or do you have a sander stowed in one of those cargo pockets?”

The footsteps headed her way and she tugged the blanket over her face again. Of course she had the balls to talk shit but didn’t dare hazard another look in his eyes. Karen was not going to lose her shit in front another person regardless of the catastrophic night she’d just endured. 

Tactical boots creaked as he crouched beside where she huddled. “You wanna tell me what happened, or should I trust Red’s fuzzy rendition of events?”

“Guess he told you I killed someone. Was that in his little anecdote?”

“A pretty bold bullet point of his presentation. Yeah. But it’s not the entire story. Red doesn’t know that though.”

There went her heart ratcheting up again. Who needed the heart beneath the floor boards when her own threatened to beat out of her chest? “He wasn’t the first guy I killed.”

No noise. No surprised gasp or even his typical male grunt of displeasure.

“Figures. Suspected you’d shot someone before by the way you held that .380. Solid two-hand grip. That look in your eyes when you trained the muzzle on me. First timer don’t do that without trembling or his eyes darting all over the place, still trying to convince himself where to plug me. You knew exactly where to put the shot to put me down. They don’t teach that kinda survivor’s discipline at a range.”

Only he could make taking a life sound so damn blasé. 

“Doesn’t mean it isn’t eating me up inside.” She hefted more cover around her and hunkered in. “The guy I killed tonight? No body. Should be mashed into the asphalt but there was nothing.”

“So what’s eating you? That you killed him or that you didn’t confirm the kill?”

Karen shook her head in the privacy of her warm little cave. “Is it fucked up that not only am I pretty sure I killed him, but I that I also really hope he’s dead?”

She dared to peer out the tiny aperture she’d left for fresh air. Blatant sympathy creased his brow before he closed up like a coffin, blocked his thoughts from his eyes. 

“Either way, he earned it. You’re not a killer by ambition, Karen. You wouldn’t have acted without being provoked to do so. It’s cheap reasoning, but don’t let others guilt you with that shiny moralistic bullshit. _You’re_ worth more than your worst sin.” 

“Don’t,” she whimpered, his words breaking the last stoic barricade keeping her emotions in check. “Don’t be nice to me. I don’t deserve it.”

“Alright,” he said and stood up. Was he going to leave? Was that it? He’d said his peace and had better things to do than calm a distraught, pathetic woman whining about killing people when he’d left so many broken bodies littered in his wake. 

She listened to him walk around to the other side of the bed, near the window he climbed through. Shit, can’t he use the damn door? Didn’t have to always be so goddamn dramatic. Instead of the sash locks clicking open, she heard something hard and heavy set down on her bedside table. 

“What are you doing?”

“Gun digs into my back when I lay down. Almost a literal pain in the ass.”

Other smaller objects clicked as he cluttered her table with them, the surplus finding a place on her dresser. 

“Um, Frank?”

“Harness chafes. Knives might be sheathed but that doesn’t mean I want them jabbing me in the rib.”

“Why are you unloading your arsenal on my bedroom furniture?”

The rasp of boot laces came as his only answer. He grunted as he yanked them off. Without further explanation, his weight sank down on the edge of the bed.

“You don’t wanna talk. I get it. Talking puts you right back there. Makes it real again when you’re doing your best convince yourself it was different. That it couldn’t possibly have happened the way your mind claims it did.” His weight shifted, unfurled behind her, close enough that the mattress sunk and rolled her bundled back against his chest. “You don’t have to talk. Just know I’m right here if you do.”

Stubbornly tight lips persevered for another five minutes, then ten, fifteen, yet Frank hadn’t moved. Hadn’t pressed or goaded in the brusque manner she expected him to. Just laid there. The heat of his body gradually seeped through the comforter, conveying passive intimacy in place of inferior words. Male musk and the faint cinnamon smell of gun oil overpowered whatever latent scents hung in the air. Sometimes he shifted, probably to awaken some sleeping limb or assuage a cramp. 

“I’m an idiot.” Karen’s small words rang clear in the still darkness.

“If you’re an idiot, I’m afraid of what that makes me.” 

“I actually believed he’d help me, you know? That maybe I could finally unpack some of this baggage I’ve been tripping over.”

Then she started to unload that baggage then and there. Showed him old scars and the bloody wounds fresh from tonight, taking caution to redact details of Daredevil’s identity and the painful circumstance of her father and brother’s death. The former was not her secret to spill and the latter she swore to never tell again. The rest she purged like bad blood. Unloading as she did in Dr Rinehart’s office but this felt right. Right in a way it hadn’t felt with Rinehart. The one-sided conversation spalled into flakes of various incidents. Leaping into tangents when her actions merited elaboration. And he laid their, listening, his solid body and heat testament of his presence. Silent, tangible affirmation that she wasn’t alone. As heartening, she supposed, as the weight of a crucifix around a religious person’s neck. 

Silent until she mentioned Wilson Fisk.

“Why would Fisk be after you?” His steady voice drawled from disuse. “Yeah, you drag people’s dirty laundry out to dry, but you haven’t so much as snatched a sock from Fisk’s overflowing pile of white collar bullshit.”

She explained her trouble with Fisk, went back all the way to the beginning. To Union Allied. What felt like lifetimes ago. About how he failed to pin a colleague’s murder on her. A murder staged in this very apartment and how difficult it’d been to scrub Dan’s bloodstains from her carpet. About how someone—she assumed Fisk—tried to then have her killed in jail by a bent guard but her luck and the guard’s nerves botched it. 

Fine tension coiled through the solid wall of Frank’s muscles like a snake ready to leap. 

“Keep going. Sounds like there’s more,” he said and she felt his chest heave in a harsh inhalation.

The story proceeded in dreadful steps, to the legal hush money she accepted for Union Allied, to her slowly tracking the white collar and heavy handed spider silk strand of corruption, discovering too late how large the web stretched. How she’d went to Saint Bénézet, a retirement home, and found physical proof of Fisk’s lies. And ultimately how that snooping led her right into a metaphorical teeth of a bear trap.

An arm wrapped her waist, cradling her, his brawny frame molded around her huddled body. What was worse? Confessing to killing Wesley through racking sobs or Frank’s sympathetic reaction to it? Confession was reserved for priests, for men who performed God’s work in milder forms than how Frank played God. Yet perhaps that’s why she felt more comfortable in this confessional of darkness and intimacy. 

He didn’t judge. He didn’t absolve. He simply understood.

“It had nothing to do with my life,” she said, her raw voice measured in careful syllables. “I told him a few times, that if he was going to kill me, just to quit his bullshit and get it over with.” 

Frank emitted a terse grunt. His fist clenched in a fold of loose floral comforter, the cheery fabric stark beneath his tanned arm. His body heat redoubled, a slow burn of anger broiling her now claustrophobic haven. Karen tugged down the sheet from her head and inhaled the chilly, fresh air. She sniffed. The air cooled the wet tracks blotting her cheeks.

“Aren’t you freezing?” She glanced over her shoulder, catching a glimpse of his black short sleeves atop bronzed skin. “Turn down the AC if your cold. My utility bill will thank you for it.”

Frank rose in a lumbering, reluctant movement and turned down the air conditioner. When he laid back down, his strapping frame curled around her in a fortress of battle hardened muscle and sinew. His knees grazed the backs of her own, his athletic thighs nestled the curve of her slenderer ones. The steel band of his burly arm drew her to his chest and she almost forgot that they were the same height. She felt small, fragile yet protected in his embrace. But above all these sensations, Frank’s hand rested on her stomach and a tiny, shameless part of her hated the blanket between them.

“He backed you in a corner,” he spoke after a prolonged silence. “Both of those assholes did. It’s their own fault they drove you to desperation.” 

Her voice was so small it was almost inaudible. “But they might have let me go…”

“So that either one of ‘em could just pluck you off the streets again? Or make good on threat to take out your loved ones? Fuck that. If I’d been the dealt the same hand with those odds, I’d’ve put a bullet in the asshole’s skull without a second thought. And that would be mercy.”

“But I’m nothing like you. I don’t have…that switch I can just flip and turn off my conscience. That’s not how my brain works.” 

His exasperated breath tickled her scalp and Frank braced his chin on the crown of her head. “Yeah. I’ve noticed.” 

“Because I’m weak.”

“You’re not weak. Weak people wind up on the southern end of the epitaph. If you were weak you’d be either dead or caved to their blackmail. Freeze up like a scared animal. You reacted. Reacted and you’re still alive for it. Don’t let every breath be a debt to them.”

“But they might have let me go…” she echoed in the closed loop of her dogged conscience. “And if Rinehart’s still alive…”

"They’d let you go for catch and release to catch again. Hold you hostage with every heartbeat. Own you with every fear, every glance over your shoulder. You didn't let the other guy—that Wesley fucker—hold you hostage, and I'll make for damn sure this Dr Rinehart— if he ain't dead already—will cut out his own eyes before he dares to look in your direction again.”

She rolled on her side then, frustrated with her inability to read his face. Audacity rebounded from the ashes of self-pity. She was about to issue a stirring statement about how she'd take care of herself, but the words shriveled when she saw his face. Frank’s expression lay unshuttered, open to her in both worry and an edge of protectiveness. His hand roved up from her hip, grazing her blanket covered arm to brush calloused fingertips along her wet cheekbone. 

"No one is going to take you like that again, Karen. So long as I can help it."

And she believed him. The coiled self-reliance which had always spirited her through hardship eased for the first time in ten years. She could rest now, if not for a moment, let someone else take over and watch her back. 

Tears welled anew and trickled down her temple and the bridge of her nose. "I definitely have the waterworks down for the classic damsel in distress."

“Damsel in distress?” The corner of his lip twitched at a grin and he wiped away a tear. "Careful, Irish. Don't rest on your laurels just yet. You might be saving me one day. This deal goes both ways so be ready pull your weight when the time comes.”

She laughed at that, the sound strange from a throat that had only known grief this night. "I'll be there with guns blazing. Might need to work on my mean mug. Though if I’ve cried off as much makeup as I think I have, I could definitely scare someone right now." She dabbed the puffiness around her eyes. Her pale skin reddened so vibrantly with the least amount of crying.

"Nah. You're the best thing I've seen in months, Irish." He tucked back one of her many unwieldy tresses, his smile sincere. 

His thumb skimmed her chin, tilting her head back so his eyes met hers. The two of them laid there in silence, simply staring at one another for the sake of just looking. No delving, no deciphering hidden motives, only two people taken by a sudden mutual fascination. 

Karen closed her eyes and giggled at her own girlish absurdity. "Wow. Got lost there for a moment. I just..."

"Trying to pick up some mean mug tips? Trust me, you don't wanna follow my lead. It involves getting your nose broken more times than you have fingers to count them on.”

"I kinda like your nose. It's...distinct."

"Distinctly huge."

She wriggled an arm free from his embrace and the constrictive swaddle of her bedding. She stroked him with a single, tender finger traced down the broad nasal bridge, mapping his rugged contours until she landed on his lips.

In a single, certifiably disastrous moment, Karen realized she had Frank Castle laying in her bed. 

Now there was a dangerous scenario.

In turn, Frank disarmed her of caution as he effectively as he had disarmed her of common sense. He kissed the supple pad of her finger. The gesture was neither an outrageous gamble nor meant to shake the world on its foundations, but his intimate caress galvanized her like a live wire’s touch. Stubble which had long surpassed 5’o clock prickled her skin as his lips slid to her palm. Frank’s delicate attentions wandered further, down to the tracery of blue veins marbling her wrist and Karen's pulse quickened there in response. A girl could only take so much without erupting. She wrenched away that very hand and buried it in the hair at his nape. The neglected length was scarcely long enough to weave her fingers through. She held him fast and lurched forward, her lips sealing over his.

This time, he didn’t fight it or hesitate. Only answered her kiss with the abandon of a unchained Prometheus, gorging himself on the fierce affection she offered. Stubble roughed skin abraded her mouth. His velvet soft tongue flicked at her lips before she opened for him, melting and reforming to his heated touches. The tang of whiskey mingled with his muddled taste of bitter black coffee. Their nuanced flavor both mindless and intoxicating that no manmade concoction could ever do justice.

His passion burned off the night’s residual fright where it had knotted in her joints. Now an entirely different set of muscles tightened and trembled, coiling again until she’d snap. She tugged him down to her and the agile soldier let himself fall. Endeavoring to keep from crushing Karen beneath his bulk, Frank’s thigh braced between hers in a deliberately ruthless tease. He nudged her there, firm and relentless, driving dull pulses of pleasure through her core. 

Now she really hated the damn floral printed barrier separating them. 

Before she even comprehended what she was doing, Karen yanked his shirt from his belt. Her hands dove under the hem to explore the heated, smooth canvas of naked skin. Burls of old scars and new leapt beneath her fingers like braille. She raked her short nails up and over the rigid columns of muscle, adding her own inscriptions to the brutal language marred upon his body. Lost in in sensation, his head lolled back and exposed his throat, so powerful yet so vulnerable to her nipping teeth and suckling mouth.

“Karen,” he groaned and it flared at the apex of her thighs and flushed high on her cheeks. 

Oh God, Frank Castle just moaned her name and she resolved to make him do it again.

What had once been haven had become a prison. A stuffy, sweltering prison. Worse, it kept her from his body. She wriggled for escape, only succeeding to tangle herself further as Frank’s knee pinned the quilt to the mattress. The man on top of her answered her frustrated grunt with a terse, muffled chuckle.

“Technical difficulties?” he spoke in a hot murmur, his mouth grinning atop her own lips.

“Move your leg.”

“Didn’t seem too keen on me moving it a second ago.” He punctuated his tease by grinding his thigh on her.

Her back bowed off the bed, her hips canting up, copping whatever friction she could despite her confinement. Needing more, her hands shot out, fumbled at his belt buckle and waistband to pry them open. She heard him murmur a broken curse before he gathered her wrists. The bastard pinned her hands above her head! No sooner had she strained against the inexorable grip than his lips fused back on hers, kissing her in an onslaught which both calmed and rioted. He kissed down the storm churning inside her, battening her fervor into submission with his own patient ferocity. After a few minutes of those torturously slow, simmering kisses, his mouth deserted her.

Karen didn’t know what had just happened or how long they had gone on. What she did know was that she hadn’t made out with anyone like that since freshman year of college. Her lips stung and felt swollen three times their usual plumpness. Her lungs heaved like bellows behind her ribs to take in air. To calm down her racing mind only to stoke the fire blistering across her skin and scorching the places his body touched hers. 

Nothing that existed beyond this bed mattered anymore. Whatever had been out there, whatever dangers assailed her or deadlines hung over her, was gone, vanished in the spell of carnality. Time measured in the heartbeat thrumming through her veins, throbbing against the plush mattress beneath her and the unyielding body above. 

When she opened her eyes, she found his gaze fastened on her face as implacably as his hands locked her wrists. Desire crackled in his dark eyes like burning filament in black glass. He struggled to rein himself in. His tongue glided over his kiss swollen bottom lip. 

“Now, I’m going get up and go draw you a bath. Give you some alone time to wash off what happened earlier tonight. Time to think of where you want this night to go. Cause once we get started, I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s been…” His hands clenched her wrists and his mouth twisted on the words. He had to look at the vacant swatch pillow beside her head before he spoke. “It’s been awhile. A good long while and I don’t know if I can be gentle once I get started. Consider that. Make this decision on the other side of a hot bath and some time alone. Yeah?”

Her eyes must have darted to the locked door because he shook his head.

“I ain’t going nowhere. Not until you decide if you want me to stay or go.” A wan smirk curled his stiff lips. “By your leave, ma’am.”

She blew a restoring breath, forcing all those overly tight muscles to loosen. “I’ll come after you if you run, Castle.”

“I’d count on it. Wouldn’t expect mercy when you found me.” 

He was already up and in her bathroom before her sluggish muscles were able to prop herself up. Senses gradually expanded beyond the microcosm of her body. She listened the heavy rush of water cascading and echoing against tile. Karen now fumbled at the covers, untangling her legs in a few lazy tugs. She stood, snatched an elastic hair tie from her vanity and pulled her blonde locks back in a messy up-do.

Behind her, the door creaked opened and his silhouette darkened the lit doorway. Frank took a few steps out of the bathroom and halted. Harsh light filtered in the dark bedroom. She understood perfectly well why his brows lowered and fists clenched, but was still taken aback by the abrupt anger. 

He glared at her neck.

 _Oh shit._ She caught her reflection in the vanity mirror. Light glowed over the curving alabaster lines of her body, broken only by her underwear and the blotchy stain of bruises branding her throat.

Karen gnawed on her bottom lip, her gaze averted from the angry heat of his stare. "Take it black and blue aren't my colors?" Her hand rose the aching ring, still hot to the touch as though the sadistic bastard had just taken his hands away. “Erm…I can cover it up if it bothers you?”

Frank exhaled through flared nostrils. Those squared shoulders rounded as he relaxed his stance.

"It's okay.” He peeled his shirt over his head in one practiced motion. The metallic gleam of his dog tags glinted atop a smudged palette of fading bruises. "We match."

As concerned as she was for his old injury, her gaze quickly dislodged from the green mottling. There was too much to look at, to take in, to inscribe on her memory for future lonely nights. The man served up a visual feast worthy of monthly subscription fee. She’d surveyed the broad shoulders and the slabbed washboard of his stomach, yet somehow her gaze snagged on the crisp runnels of his Adonis belt. Lean muscle tapered down and disappeared into his waistband and she wanted to follow right along with it.

Karen blew a breath between her lips, possibly expelling a small part of her soul. Frank Castle shirtless and she had to close the door on such a sight? Goddamn. "Alright, that's totally not fair. You expect me to actually turn my back and walk away from _that_?” 

His broad shoulders rose and fell in a nonchalant shrug, but a lopsided smirk betrayed his arrogance. "Hey, you laid there in your underwear, wrapped up like a present and begging to be opened. Yet I somehow kept my baser needs in check. Now go take your bath before the water cools. Be a shame to waste all that hot water.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I am evil, but I really wanna write protective, angry Frank in the next chapter. So he needs time to make a phone call to a certain dubiously dead villain.


	6. The Oncoming Storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, thank you to all my kind, patient, beautiful readers who deal with my sluggish pace. Second, eff you, life, for literally causing calamity the second I sit down to type. Seriously. I type out one sentence and get a call from my daughter's teacher about an incident on a field trip. Spend the next 5 hours in the ER. Then try to write again next day and same daughter breaks the soap dispenser in the bathroom when I'm about three words deep, creating a huge soapy mess of ceramic shards and Softsoap. Why.
> 
> But I have about half of the next chapter written and it's actually filthy. The good kind of filthy. So here's hoping that bad luck can hold off for a day or two.

Her small window unit churned out enough cold air to warrant cold weather gear. Hairs raised down his neck and prickled up his bare forearms, but he ignored the chill. Every place her body touched his warmed faster than any standard issue gor-tex jacket could ever achieve. Felt a hell of a lot nicer too.

Her body rolled back, flush to his front. He was struck upside the head by second thoughts about this particular method of comforting a person. This was probably a tactical blunder on par with invading Russia during the onset of winter. But this was how Maria comforted him when he came home haunted by those missions that gutted him. His wife never spoke, never turned on the light, or prodded for his confession. Just simply laid there behind him, drawing him back to the world with her quiet presence alone. 

Slowly, the air conditioner’s hum and the slight rustle of the sheets wore her down. Karen might be one of the toughest broads he’d ever met, but Frank could lay there all night and day until she decided to either talk or stab him with one of his knives. Unfortunately, laying so close also affected him in ways his foresight had been blind to.

To put it bluntly, laying in bed with Karen gave him an erection he could hang a damn flag off of. Months flew by without any physical intimacy and it had been excruciatingly longer since he’d last taken a woman to bed. His libido scarce reared its horny head in those lengthy, abstinent stretches, but when it did he handled it on his lonesome. Those miserable few times he spent pawing himself ended with him either losing interest in his hand or losing his stiffy altogether thanks to his inescapable frustration with his life. If he could call what he did day-to-day _life_ that is. 

But tonight he lay down with a woman and the plastic buttons of his BDU placket strained against his hard-on like a damn torture device. _Christ. Please let these blankets be thick enough that she doesn’t feel that._ he thought and attempted to tilt away from the siren call of her cozy backside. Regardless of the cloth barrier between them, his mind seemed stuck on the image of her gorgeous body, on the ivory sweep of its pale glow in the dark, barely covered by the frilly fabric swatches women considered underwear. And it drove him absolutely bugfuck knowing how little she wore as she lay in the same bed.

_That's not the reason you're here, you selfish asshole. Calm the fuck down._

He had to hand it to her though, the woman had a way of frying his better judgement like a downed power line. Lust, fury, confusion...all those animalistic sensations running on a separate current from his conscience. It roiled there beneath the surface, primed and ready to detonate, taking her down with him. Pissed at himself and lightheaded from his ignoring his dick, he rerouted his focus on the cold air conditioning frosting down his spine rather than the warm, scantily clad woman with only a meager inch of fabric between their bodies.

But then she started crying and all his unspent arousal drained away, his anger swelling up in its place. Everyone of her sobs hit worse than one of Fisk’s sucker punches. _Fisk._ The bastard was going to die slowly for all the shit he put a good woman through. Pinning a murder on her. Trying to off her in jail. Forcing her to literally shoot her way out of a bad situation. Frank distinctly remembered his fingers twisting the coverlet as he pretending it was the kingpin’s thick neck. Sensationalist media was wrong, Frank wasn’t a sadist. He took no pleasure in killing, but he’d enjoy putting Wilson Fisk through his paces before putting the crook down for good. 

All for her. He’d burn down the whole fucking world to ferret out those who’d ever harmed her.

 _What the hell is she doing to me?_ Laying there, sobbing her heart out, listening thoughtfully to his advice, and then laughing at his stupid wisecracks. Her mood became the fulcrum for his own demeanor to pivot upon. Dominated him with her lighthearted laughs so that he’d do anything within his power to bring her joy. Whatever resolve he had left crumbled when she rolled to face him.

Women had a way of emotionally kneecapping a guy and then smiling on, gentle as a Catholic madonna as the poor sucker plead for quarter at their dainty feet. And Frank had always loved that about them. Loved that about Karen. The torturous curve of those full lips and the prospect of those legs wrapped around his waist, trapping him, claiming him. And she did all that with a smile, with the tender glister in her slightly slanted azure eyes. Irises cool blue as Caribbean waters. Eyes like paradise on earth.

His reins slipped. And only when he had her pinned to the bed and drinking her kisses did he realize how far he’d drove off the rails. Shit. He needed to clear his head. He needed to put several feet of space between them. Hell, he needed some of the goddamn blood to drain out of his dick and back into his head to think straight, regroup before he took them both down in flames.

A bath. Alright. Great idea. That seemed more sane than dropping and doing push-ups until he exhausted himself, which was next course of action..

Those minutes apart calmed him only to have the bruises on her neck plummet Frank back into a smoldering rage. He might not be able to punch Fisk’s timecard tonight, but he could certainly wrangle up information on this prick of a psychiatrist who started this shit. 

The bathroom door closed behind her. _Without the click of the lock,_ his situational awareness felt the need to chime in. Darkness swallowed the tiny apartment and his eyes quickly adjusted to it. Though there were no shortage of lamps scattered around, he ignored them, enjoying the stillness that accompanied the dark. Instead Frank tied back one of her frilly curtains and opened the window he had come through. 

Lightning cracked overhead, the bolt obscured behind the cloud choked night sky. In the distance, a police siren howled Hell's Kitchen's favorite lullaby. A humid breeze charged with an oncoming storm. Even now a few sparse drops pelted the fire escape in front of him. But Frank leaned out nonetheless, the air clearing his head, realigning his focus from the woman in the other room to doing whatever he could to protect her.

He wasn’t the only one concerned about Karen Page’s wellbeing. His spied the Devil perched on a roof top across the street and Frank’s top lip peeled back in a sneer. Shit. These assholes in their masks made a fucking shell game out of identifying friendly forces over aggressors. He thought back to the safe-house, how he’d lowered his gun so goddamn easy when any fucker with resources could get a similar costume. Stupid. His active shooter instructors would take turns smacking him upside the head for so hastily standing down.

Frank glared at him, hoping the heat of it lanced the horned spectator from a distance. It was a delayed reaction, but the Devil held both hands and shook his head. 

“Alright, Frank,” he yelled just loud enough to be heard over the street between them. “I’m going. But if she has any more problems, tell her to contact me.” And he was off amid the rooftops.

Now that he’d dismissed the nanny dog, Frank dug his phone out of one of his numerous cargo pockets and brought up Micro’s main number. He shot him a laconic text with the words _**Doctor Ludwig Rinehart/New York City/Psychiatrist.**_ No further detail. No platitudes. No shallow inquiries about Micro’s night or even a _sorry_ if for some act of god the man was actually asleep right now. They weren’t chums, they were freelance partners at best. Their working relationship dependent on Micro’s faith in Frank’s sanity and Frank’s reliance on Micro’s cybermancy. He slid the phone back in his cargo pocket.

For the next twenty minutes thunder rolled over the rooftops, rattling the window panes above his head. The static cling smell of ozone slowly drowned out the oppressive humidity. He inhaled deep breaths of it, holding it in his chest as if to savor the burgeoning storm as a cigar connoisseur savors spicy smoke.

She never locked the bathroom door. 

The telltale click never sounded and that little tidbit kept cropping up in his thoughts. If he didn’t stay wedged half out this window, he’d walk back to the bathroom door, put his hand on for the knob and hopefully recoup his senses before crossing that line. _Shit._ Frank dragged his palm over his face.

He could strip himself to bare walls and cold floors, close off those sappy parts of him like hacking off limbs. But regardless of how deep he dug himself in the bunker, her light slipped in through the cracks. Karen Page denied him his hermitage by the sheer force of her existence. 

His phone vibrated.

 _ **You looking to get your head checked?**_ followed by one of those obnoxious emoji things Micro preloaded all his phones with. 

Frank didn’t bother typing out a response. Micro enjoyed his little digs but was wiser than to keep his partner waiting. Several dossiers popped up. Micro gleaned private info from encrypted records with the finesse of a cutpurse charming a pocket. Frank skimmed the documents and found exactly what he was looking for.

Doctor Ludwig Rinehart, or birth name Quentin Beck, formerly employed at Saint Bénézet Retirement Care. Huh. Karen had mentioned that place. The same old folks home Fisk’s mother was cared for. Guess that was his in with Fisk. He read on until he was satisfied with the intel then messaged Micro.

_**Contact**_

Several numbers and email accounts popped up, handily organized by most recent use. A cell number took top billing.

Frank glanced over his shoulder, not that Karen could sneak up on him, but as a reminder to keep his voice down. He leaned out the window once again, a cool air buffeting between the buildings and sliding over his face like warm silk. The drizzle abated in the proverbial calm before it let loose over the sleeping city. Rinehart’s cell number, a number the prick had accessed no more than a half hour ago, was punched in and ready to go. But how to go about it? Does he play the negotiator or the brute? Plan A was contingent on Rinehart’s tight lips. If the call came quick enough, Frank could let fear do the work for him. But if he was too late, then it looked like he’d be back out on the street enacting Plan B, ready to collect some heads, to spill a river of blood between Karen and Fisk.

Yet either plan required the Punisher. 

A cold hearth of anger flared when he summoned the persona. The way Frank viewed it over the course of his life on and off the battlefield, everyone had a monster living inside them. Some monsters were locked up tight only to escape through portals of extreme trauma, others had frothing jaws snapping for the chance to rip out someone’s throat. Frank kept his monster collared on a short chain, the leash growing longer and longer with every bloody night he let the beast out to run wild.

 _Fuck you. I'm not your damn lap dog,_ his dark stalker growled from his pen.

 _You wanna do this or no?_ Frank shot back. 

_Better than all sappy shit you’ve been putting yourself through. Wish you’d just get it over with a fuck her if you’re going to be that much of a bitch about it._

Frank ignored him and tapped the the green call button.

A man picked up after the first two rings. “Yes?”

“Sound awfully spry for a dead man.”

“You have a wrong number.”

“Must’ve left your brains smeared on the asphalt if you think that bullshit’s gonna work on me, Quentin.”

The breath dragged out of the man on the other line as though Frank put a boot on his neck. “Who is this?”

“I’m your worst fucking nightmare if you try that shit you pulled tonight ever again. And let me tell you something, you’ll wish you were dead when I start working you over, and you’ll stay dead when I’m finished. If your as smart as your smarmy accent implies, you’ll forget Karen Page exists.”

The other man actually snorted. “Ah! Mr. Castle. Certainly live up to your cheerful reputation. Don’t you have anything better to do than play guard dog to a bitch?”

“Roster’s open tonight. You looking’ to be on it?”

“I’m not quite sure why you’re threatening me. The woman’s a murderer as well. Or do the pretty blonde ones get a pass? That’s blatant discrimination. However, I doubt Mr. Fisk cares either way.” 

The violent fury seethed up the back of his throat but he swallowed it. Rage was no good to him when his target wasn’t within killing distance. He had to be smart about this. 

_What’s the weakness of all men like this pretentious asshole?_ The Punisher whispered in his mind. _C’mon, Frank. Hit him where it hurts._

“Ah, so you’re sucking up to your boss for a promotion. That’s sweet. And look where you’ve worked up from. Quentin Beck scammed blue haired old ladies out of their coin purses. Not very imaginative nor clever. Guess that’s why you took on a new gig, new identity.”

"I am clever, you fucking troglodyte. Clever enough to lure Ms. Page into my hands. And my plan would have worked too—“

"If it weren't for those meddling kids and their dog?"

"Shut up!"

“Oh, you’re angry. That's cute.”

"I came back from the dead."

"So does this other jackass I know. Wears red jammies. At least he's funny."

“Ingrates like you can never appreciate the finer nuances beyond heavy-handed explosions and gunfire. The tactical grace, the delicate symmetry of the strings all woven in the right pattern like a spider’s web to capture all the simple-minded insects. You wish were half as smart as I am.”

“Bullshit. Sounds to me like you’re a coward who doesn’t wanna get his hands dirty. Ever fought your own battles, or are ya too chickenshit? I'm calling it. You're the prick who gets everyone else to do his business because you know in your shriveled little balls you can't handle it on your own. Enter the joker in the devil get up.Where’d you get him from? The circus?”

The other man started to speak and Frank cut him off. He loved silencing people who took perverse joy in hearing their own voices. To stamp dirty bootprints all over their shiny narcissism.

"Hovering around psychopaths likeWilson Fisk is just a pathetic ploy at being interesting. Like a fly buzzing around a steaming turd. If it weren’t for your actions tonight, you wouldn’t even be a ping on my radar. Low-level mafia bag boys are more interesting than you and your _cleverness_.”

"Let me kill Ms. Page. Perhaps that will ping on your radar, as you put it. Or better yet, I’ll just have Mr. Fisk do it. Tattle Ms. Page’s little secret. You may be a mongrel son of a rabid bitch, Mr. Castle, but you were correct in your assumption. I’d prefer to keep me hands clean. I hear you were on the receiving end of the Kingpin’s fists once. How long many hits do you think it’ll take to smash that little blonde bitch’s face beyond recognition?”

Frank let the silence sit between them until it curdled like rancid milk. “Now, despite me being a fucking troglodyte and a mongrel, I seem to recall some of my high school philosophy. Occam’s Razor. Fisk probably knows that one too. Which sounds simpler? The skittish girl unloading a clip into a poor bastard with his own gun at some secret meeting, or an opportunistic asshole by the name of Quentin Beck looking to move up in the world. Scum always finds a way to rise to the top.”

Silence reigned before a steady, measured exhalation of Beck’s held breath. 

Frank words cut through the silence. “There was certain security breach of security at Saint Bénézet concerning Fisk’s mother. Maybe this unfortunate episode required one Quentin Beck, a Saint Bénézet employee, to have a rendezvous with a trusted associate of Wilson Fisk. That very night the guy ended getting plugged under dodgy circumstances and look who risen up to take his job. Pretty fucking serendipitous, ain’t it?” 

“Are you going to break back into Riker’s and tell him that?”

“Nah. Won’t have to. Ever consider I might have bag boys of my own? There’s already a story waiting to be thrown to the press if you think killing me will silence me,” Frank lied but it’d be easy enough to arrange. “So here you are. Stuck between me and the Kingpin. I mean, at least with him it’ll probably be over quickly. But me, shit, I’ll drag you down to hell and introduce you to the Devil himself. Not the one you so cleverly tried to counterfeit either.”

“All this over that scrawny bitch?” the other man hissed.

“You know what? Now you’re just pissing me off.” Frank laid some extra gravel in his voice. “You got an hour to get the fuck outta Dodge. One hour. Or else you're leaving this life by way of unidentifiable pieces hacked off into the Bronx sewage treatment vats. Return you to the cesspool you climbed out of.” And just like that, he paved over the gravel and with a sheet of ice. "I could cut on you for days, Quentin. Fire and a blade to cauterize ever slice. Keep you from bleeding out. Every smell sizzling blood? Cause I’ll leave your nose on long enough to enjoy the stench of your own. First, I'll take that fool's gold tongue so you can't scream. Then I'll slice off your eyelids so you won't miss the show when I start hacking off your toes and working my way up. Maybe I’ll feed them to you? Or maybe your last meal’s gonna be the splinters of your broken teeth.”

The pause was interrupted by a frantic rustling and a closed door. Frank heard the sound of the rolling thunder’s tinny echo on his phone. The bastard had moved outside.

“Alright, guess I’ll go gear up and head out then,” Frank warned, shirtless and unmoving.

“You may have just bought Ms. Page’s life back, but watch yourself, Mr. Castle. You’re going to pay for it one day at the expense of your own.” There was the sound of a car door shutting. “Good night, Mr. Castle. Until next time. Oh, and why don’t you ask Ms. Page about what happened to her father and brother. It’s quite the riveting tale of woe.” 

The phone disconnected with a ping. Frank took from his ear and stared at the screen for several seconds. Then he shook off his battle trance, the volatile tension slowly receding to a low buzz before he messaged Micro.

_**Keep tabs on the tango. Phone. Transactions. GPS.**_

The reply shot back within seconds.

 _ **K. So what are u doing around the residence of one Ms Karen Page?**_ heeled by another stupid kissyface emoji. Goddamn, he despised those things. 

_**Call me if Beck comes within a ten block radius of this place. Otherwise I’m taking a the rest of the night off.**_

His fingers twitched as he laid his phone on the nightstand. He wanted to hurt something. Wanted to watch Beck’s eyes redden with bursted capillaries, feel the sinewy in his tendons strain beneath his thumbs as he…

 _Alright. Enough. We scared the guy shitless. Back in your cage._ he told the darker, bloodthirsty side of his coin.

But the Punisher stalked a restless circle like a rival stag ready to lock horns, his every mental step matching Frank's. Sometimes the beast refused to slink back into his pen. He grew less human with every confrontation in the desolate battle ground of his fractured psyche. Came back colder. Sometimes Frank saw him in dreams, the skull stretching outwards against his skin, deepening the orbits of his eye sockets and jut of his cheekbones. The eyes were chiseled fathomless pits set in bruised flesh, void of life yet frost bitten in their cold hatred.

 _We need to have a talk, pal._ The words rattled around teeth gnarled half out of the maniac’s mouth. _Get you back to shipshape. Now about the girl…_

_Leave her outta this._

_No. You’ve been running us in goddamn circles over that woman for almost a goddamn year. So I’m here to straighten you out, boy._ he said in an eerily familiar tone. Frank flashed to a memory of his father, towering over him with a heavy leather belt looped in his open palm. He hastily blotted the vision away. _You’re confused on how to proceed with her. What lies at the root of confusion, Frank? You’re a smart boy under that dumb jarhead act. You know the answer._

The last person he could lie to lived in the other half of his brain. Was this what talking to God was like for religious nuts? His interrogator inescapable, he conceded. _The root of confusion is resistance to the truth._

_And which truth are you resisting? Go ahead. Strip it all out. All those roadblocks you threw up and smacked us into to avoid the inevitable. Your past life. Your future. The decorated warrior. The murderous vigilante gig. Put all that crap on mute. What’s the truth you’re combating harder than you ever did on any battlefront?_

_That I want her._

He resisted it, fought blade and bullet against matters his better judgement failed to quash. He wanted Karen Page. Wanted her in his corner for her tenacity and wanted her in his bed because she was the sexiest thing he’d seen after returning from the emotionless void of his grief. He was stuck on Karen because she saw him for what he was, peered into his darkness and never flinched.

And there it was. How fucked was he that the Punisher guided him towards his zen moment? Somewhere in him, a key turned, opening up rooms he'd locked so long ago. Slowly, all that is Karen Page invaded those rooms, left traces of her presence until she owned them. There was no getting rid of her now.

Not that he presumed her to be a pearl clutching prim and proper, but if she could only glimpse what he wanted to do to her—or knew some stories of how hard he played in bed in his past life—she'd probably fold, throw down her cards, push away from the table and never dare play this game with him ever again. 

Yet he didn't have the cards left to play that hand anymore. What Frank longed for required both of them to be torn down to the foundation, to give themselves in a way he was no longer capable. It wasn't fair to her. To ask everything, to sift her soul in his hands without offering the same in return. She’d come to hate him, truly and utterly despise him for holding out. Christ knows Maria had her moments and they had been married for over a decade.

 _Don't delude yourself. She's not yours. She'll never be yours. Take this for what is and what she's willing to give._

His stomach steadily unclenched. The ice floe in his veins heated to a lazy hot spring, but it was temporary. Like the hot water he’d poured for her bath. It had to be. Otherwise he'd be back out the window and slicking the streets in fresh, steaming blood. Because people out there needed the Punisher more than Frank needed happiness. Because he'd never make peace the brutal past which razed all he had loved. Because those ghosts would drift back to haunt him the second he left this apartment. Once he walked out that door, brackish grief steadily dripped in his bloodstream until he hemorrhaged mayhem. And in a way, he took comfort in the impending despair.

Frank Castle could have his night of pretty floral bedding and soft skin so long as he paid his tithe of blood. 

_You can visit but you can't stay. Don't even think about it, asshole_ the Punisher warned before the cage door clacked shut.

Outside, thunder rolled in one bombastic groan and a torrent began its barrage of the city streets.


	7. Hunter's Kiss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I did it. I finally made it to the smut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm unhappy with the prose but I've been chipping away at it for a week now. So here you go! Enjoy my trash!

She could kiss Frank for making her take a hot bath. Well, she’d kiss Frank for many reasons—or no reason in particular—if she were honest with herself. 

Karen underestimated the physical toll this evening’s earlier scuffle took. The adrenaline had flooded her veins and hardened there, her muscles as tough as vulcanized rubber. A similar strain had happened when she shot Wesley. She’d blamed the firearm’s recoil then, but it was more than that. Every muscle in her arms and back steeled in distress and locked that way for hours, an annoying consequence of fight or flight. Only those lucky enough to live got to suffer it. 

Even the most basic stretch ached like advanced yoga. She reached behind her back to remove her bra and her tight joints cramped and complained. A mischievous little voice tempted to call Frank in and ask for his help. Ultimately she decided against it, slid the straps off her shoulders, and spun the band around to unclasp the tiny eyelets. 

All those aches and knots dissolved the moment she sunk her body into the bath’s welcome, warm embrace. A respite so simple but so luxurious she felt like crying again. God, hadn’t she shed enough tears tonight? Did she even have any tears left to cry? 

As fear had twisted her one way, arousal wound her in an opposite, though equally merciless direction. Her twisted up nerves unraveled in the heavy heat of solitude. In one blissfully boring instant, she was simply allowed to _be_. It was perfect. No crisis of conscience or unslakable lust. It didn’t matter that she lacked fancy pulsing jets or elegant bath salts. 

_Although some company might be nice._ She bit her bottom and slid deeper in to the water, giddy with the thought of her shoulder blades nestled against his strong chest, his toned thighs splayed and bracketing her own legs. The Marine stripped out of his uniform. He’d leave the dog tags on of course. 

…and there went her nerves twisting up again. If Frank Castle shared the tub with her, tranquility would be the last thing on her mind. Her pulse had a habit of ratcheting whenever he was near. She might have a full on heart attack if he’d offered to join her.

 _And it would be such a lovely way to die._ But the naughty daydream fizzled and her mind turned to cynicism. _I swear to God, if this a ploy to sneak out on me…_

Each passing minute of the other room’s silence taxed her anxiety. She was convinced he redressed and skulked out until she heard him speak. A one-sided conversation. A phone call? 

The words were lost through the 2-inch thick particleboard of the bathroom door, but the wood failed to muffle the soft rumble of his voice. She shuddered. A hopelessly atavistic reaction to a relentlessly primal man, his tone bypassed her ears and vibrated straight through her nipples and stomach. Frank Castle didn’t need to touch, or even be in the same room to arouse a woman. He was dangerous like that. More dangerous than she ever imagined and it had nothing to do with spilled blood and spent gunpowder. 

Despite the warm bathwater, a shiver kissed up her spine at the words he spoke before.

 _…I don't know if I can be gentle…_

Oh. Okay. Something so menacing shouldn't sound so absurdly hot. Recollection dropped her back in that moment, the husky tone like gritty velvet, his body heat soaking through his clothes carrying the scent of him. Of sweat and leather and male.

“…I don't know if I can be gentle," he warned with his knee wedged between her thighs and her lips still stinging from his scruffy kisses. 

Then the voice on the other side of the door quieted and she missed its cadence. She heard him pace, his feet purposefully heavy on her squeaky floorboards, assuring he hadn’t left. Karen’s heart fluttered just a tiny bit every time he strayed near the bathroom door. 

_Open the door,_ she mouthed because she was too afraid he’d hear her whisper. 

But Frank, as gruff and indomitable as men come, had an honor code fortified by self-discipline. And if he told her this night lay in her hands, he’d not wrest the choice out of them by barging in. Yet he made no promises of good behavior once she decided, which she had done the moment the bathroom door closed and she was separated from him. Absence made the heart grow fonder, but a leaving a sexy, shirtless man in another room compounded lust in spades.

Of course she was going to sleep with Frank Castle. 

She might exercise poor discretion, chase a curiosity prone to trouble, and generally move about her life with the reckless abandon of a freight-hopper, but Karen Page wasn’t stupid. Nor was she a nun. If she didn’t do this, she’d only end up regretting it as she regretted walking away the night they first kissed.

After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

_That’s not how it works!_ the shrewish voice of her subconscious chastised. _Sleeping with a man who deals death like meter maids deal parking tickets is not applicable to that saying!_

Alright, maybe these weren’t the _exact_ conditions the person who crafted that famous little adage had in mind. But whatever. 

_Great. This is just great. Let's jump into bed with this volatile, brooding disaster of man. This isn't going to end well and you know it. He’s not even your type!_

To be fair to her hedonistic whims, Frank defied the social construct of a _type_. Shallow ideas like a _type_ were irrelevant in the world he belonged in but was a born a millennium too late to enjoy. Her past dance card was filled with handsome or pretty men. The man in other room wasn’t handsome, and he sure as hell wasn’t pretty, but he had a gladiator’s magnetism, a grifter’s charm, and what must be one heady dose of undiluted pheromones. Frank compromised her on deeper, darker levels beyond a preference for good hair and sharp clothes. No, a man like Frank tempted the dusk from a woman’s soul and brought her out to play after dark.

 _But he's hot._ was her succinct rebuttal to her inner pessimist.

_He's also a murderer._

_Then why do I feel safe for the first time in years?_

Her conscious went mum on that point, conceded another offering to burn on the pyre of her poor life choices. Unlike other mistakes, at least she'd enjoy this potentially catastrophic decision until it exploded in her face like a letter bomb from her past self. 

Water cool and fingers pruning, she had no choice but slip out of the tub and into her terry cloth bathrobe. The sea foam green garment was supposed to fall to the knee but lingered mid-thigh on her long legs. Faded from numerous washes and worn years past its life expectancy, the robe was hardly meant for seduction but what else could she do? Walk out there naked? As deadset as her body seemed on sex, her mind still whispered its sabotage. What if she walked out there, got a bad read on him, and called it off? What if he flipped a 180 and swept any type of physical intimacy off the table? What if, what if, what…fuck, her commitment crumbled beneath all these alternate realities her brain conceived.

She cursed again as she realized her make-up was in the bedroom. Not as though she intended to get dolled up, but a few dabs of powder and maybe a coat of lip gloss provided a woman some armor before she went into battle. Karen looked in the mirror, a frown crumpling her prim brow at what she saw.

_No make-up and wearing your ratty old bathrobe. Ah, all the trappings of seduction right here._

At least she combed her hair and dried it so as not to look like a water logged mess. Feathers skittered inside her stomach and she met her reflection headlong in the mirror. _You're 32! Get a grip before you're reduced a simpering, giggling mess of a school girl. The man's not taking you to prom and then make-out point. Quit agonizing over the possibilities and just feel, react._

"I don't think I can be gentle," she whispered, the fluttering sensation transmuted into a warm shiver down her chest and between her legs. “Bring it on, bud.”

The bathroom light trespassed into the dark room, slid across his back in a widening stripe, glinting in scars and limning the red scores of what must have been her own nail marks. Frank kept post at the window. His arms folded over his bare chest as he stared into the dwindling hours of night. The stance of a sentinel in low alert, never truly at ease and ready to spring into action at a second’s notice. Those rigid muscles betrayed not a single twitch or tremor. He was still as a tableau or if someone had simply hit the _pause_ button. The only movement was the calm breath expanding and contracting his ribs and the heavy rain drumming the window beyond. 

Frank’s absolute composure ran her own nerves to riot. Her heart rate steadily hitched as the universe condensed, matched the tightness in her chest and throat.

Waylaid by doubt, she lingered by the door jamb, convincing herself that life wasn't about to fork on to two different paths of which she may only chose one. Shit. This was a hell of a lot easier when she had him in her bed or even in that alleyway. Overthinking was the impediment of progress, and it had been entirely too easy to switch off her brain with Frank's lips on her.

The indomitable tug of silence demanded her verdict. This was her boat to steer, her course to plot, her choice to proceed where they'd left off or just move on and forget. Well, maybe not _forget_ , as Frank had a way of branding her memory. Her choice to _disengage._ There. That's the word. He wasn't a self-entitled asshole like men who believed women owed them gratitude of both the emotional and physical varieties. Gratitude was wasted breath to him. He'd understand, maybe even entertain relief if she thanked him for checking on her, for playing her morally ambiguous therapist. Frank would redress, collect his weapons, and leave with little better than mumbled platitudes. 

They were adults. Neither owed the other person shit.

But that's not what she wanted. 

Karen switched off the harsh bathroom light, dropping her apartment into darkness once again. The small room was made smaller by the man standing in it. His wide back blotted out the orange hue of the dingy street lights, reducing his frame to silhouette.

Every step closer to the inevitable spurred the fever in her blood. Karen grew so woozy she felt like she floated an inch off the ground. Shaking off the fog, she sunk her toes into the shallow pile rug and padded to her dresser to turn on the lamp. She was never a _leave the lights off_ kinda girl. A whisper of light pressed back the shadows but failed to dispel them. Details emerged from the darkness. All that was his strewn about, clashed with her decor, her life. Frank’s Otter Box-encased phone laid next to her slender rose gold iPhone. His black KA-BAR knife harsh where he’d set it beneath the crystal vase of wilted white roses.

He kept his back to her. Granted her privacy to dress or take care of other intimate business a studio apartment lacked the walls to hide. The wan light bounced off the window, overlaying his unsmiling reflection in the glass. He was closed to her again. Bath time allowed him to throw up the barricade and batten the hatches. 

With one more deep, fortifying breath, Karen stepped behind him, her face manifesting in the glass beside his. This was it. She leaned in close enough to feel the warmth radiate off his shoulder, smelled the sweat and musk infused in that very heat. Still, his face remained carefully neutral to her proximity. In a single, languid motion, her hands slid to twine around his bare waist as her lips grazed the hard ridge of his trapezus muscle. And at that decisive moment the steel melted from his taut body. Everything closed blasted open with a tremor down his back. Frank Castle, a man unbroken by torture or threat, yielded beneath her touch alone. She kept her gaze trained on the glass, watched as his eyes met hers in a reflection spattered with rain. It was the look of abject surrender after fighting the long war. A look of utter exhaustion and relief.

Frank lowered his hand cover her own.

“You gotta understand something before this goes any further,” he spoke without turning, a slight shake in the strong voice. “I can’t promise you anything past tonight. Things that make sense at night usually crumble in the cold light of day.” 

“I don’t care. It’s selfish, but I don’t give a shit anymore. This isn’t about happy endings. I almost died tonight. For all I know, you could be dead tomorrow night. Aren’t you tired of living your live constantly looking back and forward instead of focusing on the moment? I am.”

Right now, she focused on the moment by mapping the rugged terrain of his torso with a cartographer’s touch, her thumbs skimming down abs as smooth and hard as sunbaked river stones. They then ambled their way along the twin grooves of his Adonis belt, chased the runnels all the way down until she landed on his belt. Frank mumbled a curse as her fingertip played along the heated, soft skin along his waistband. High off her his scent and empowered by his reaction, she teased a feathery touch down his closed fly. _Ah, so that's where all that rigid tension melted to and hardened._

He made a amused noise of a grunt. The man could compose an entire language based on grunts and mumbles. 

"Is this what you were tryin' to get at earlier?" He laid his larger hand over hers, pressed her palm flush to the hard ridge. “Damn near though you were gonna tear my BDUs open.”

The length of him twitched beneath the black twill, rapidly swelling in the none-to-roomy crotch of his fatigues as his chiseled abs tensed to brick. That had always fascinated her about men. How he grew harder, firmer as her own body softened, succumbed to that roiling wet heat pooling low in her belly. Her knees wobbled as though popped from jello molds while he could likely sweep her up and run laps. 

Exploiting her imbalance, he turned in her arms, ripped away the red line between them. The tension broke then mantled until it spiked tenfold, binding two people in an instant. She was trapped with Frank Castle now.

Lightning flashed. White light flickered over his face to the sound of the sky cracking open. Yet neither person flinched. Karen stood there like some willowy little scribe before a hulking gladiator. Imperious, lethally seductive, the bronzed warrior; proud of the battle-scars marring his tawny flesh. The broad shoulders tipped back in an arrogance that transcended the blatantly military stance. He had his stubborn chin canted, looking down his nose at her, waiting.

She no longer felt like she’d float away, not as the full weight of his stare pinned her in place. Ink black pupils spilled over dark brown irises, intense eyes full of cleverness, hunger, mischief and galvanized with an undercurrent of ferocity. Hunter’s eyes locked on prey. His stare slowly slid down to her mouth and he wet his lips. Everything slowed down. Plenty of time to change course yet the crash was imminent.

Frank appeared determined to pace this, to take his time despite the impending dawn just a few hours away. His knuckles grazed up the column of her throat, wandering across her jaw until they appraised the fullness of her bottom lip. She tried his patience with a teasing, tempting suckle of his thumb. If he wanted patience then she was going to kill him with it.

“Careful, Irish. I’m tryin’ to take it slow. Wanna enjoy this.” He leaned in, his mouth a hairsbreadth from her ear. His low voice came in a rumble of distant thunder. “Think you’re gonna enjoy it too.” 

And then Frank kissed her, _kiss_ being a flimsy little term for outright tormenting her with his self-control. He slanted his mouth over hers, dealing one slow burn of a kiss which blazed a path through her lips to settle in her stomach. The sensation crackled outwards into the tips of her nerves as lighting bolts cut across the night sky outside. Warm, large hands bracketed her jaw, a capable hold of his rough callouses rasping delicate skin. Purposefully tender and devastatingly restrained. Her own fingers roamed up his chest and latched onto his dog tags, twined the thin metal ball chain in her grasp and tugged it. Frank snarled and Karen broke the embrace by nipping his lower lip.

“What makes you think,” she said slyly, her breath hot on his stubbled jaw as her fingers played at his belt buckle again, “that I want it _slow_ after all the bullshit you’ve put me through?”

While Frank schooled the hunger from his face, he couldn’t prevent his adam’s apple from bobbing in his throat. He’d break. He had to break. Both of them probably weren’t getting out of this night without a few new bruises.

"You'll tell me if I go to far?" she asked, already kicking herself when humor glittered up from the dark depths of his eyes.

“Try not to rip the taffeta on my prom dress. I babysat all summer to pay for it.” 

“Jackass”

Oh, it was time to drag the beast out his den. Without breaking eye contact, she set about unbuckling his web belt. The woven length slid loose to dangle on either side of his fly. Despite having an eager woman plotting her way into his trousers, his face remained carefully neutral, if not amused. So Karen upped the ante. There was a button fastening where she expected a zipper. Each heavy duty button came undone with a minor fumble as she refused to look away from his face. No, Karen was going to watch Frank’s stoicism dismantle piece by hard won piece. She operated by touch alone. Even as she unfastened the final button, those black eyes offered only a blasé regard. Damn his black soul. 

She churlishly scowled and hooked her thumbs in the waistbands of both his underwear and pants, shoved them down his hips and let gravity do the rest. 

Now the corner of his mouth bent into that crooked smirk. "You forgot the boot blousers, Irish.”

Like a sucker, her eyes flicked down to his feet. The fabric pooled about his calves was an afterthought, her brain spluttered at the panty-soaking sight of Frank Castle in his full, naked glory. _Oh. Damn_ The man was a living, breathing cheat code into a woman’s pants. Her eyes widened and her cheeks flushed like lava had been poured into them, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to censor such a blatant reaction.

His cock curved up from trimmed black fur, the weeping head olive-pink and almost grazing his toned stomach. Thick but not monstrous. So basely masculine and proudly endowed that she felt implicitly more feminine in response. He also had the nicest thighs she’d ever seen because why the fuck not? Maybe she had fallen 46 stories to her death because no man was _this_ perfect who walked the face of the earth.

Another harsh growl rolled up from his throat and her gaze snapped up. His expression quickened during those fleeting seconds she’d spent gawking at his body. Now his features drew in primal savagery. Arrogance migrated from mouth to eyes, glittered there in onyx rimmed pupils so blown out she lost herself in them. She read his eyes, tasted the electric charge in the sliver of space separating them. 

He _liked_ the way she looked at him, liked the hunger, liked how she stumbled over the coarse physicality and military sculpted physique. Or perhaps it was the predator’s pleasure for the her awe? The raw, penetrating gaze ensnared her and this must be what the doe felt when the huntsman sets his sight on her. His hands hung at his sides. Frank’s fingers twitched as he struggled to keep himself in check, as if he’d lunge at her for even the slightest movement away from him and take her there on the floor without hesitation.

In other words, her teasing had backfired. Gloriously. She wanted the beast and she’d not only summoned him but removed his collar as well.

"Gonna finish taking off my pants,” he said in a guttural drawl and slowly sat on her bed. 

Karen’s fingers trembled again. She twisted them together at the front of her robe as words desiccated in her dry throat. All the moisture in her body seemed to drip south. Understandable given the salacious sight she was treated to.

His gruff frame settled on her pretty floral bed, hunched over, his knee crooked, foot tilted upward as he unclasped some type of ankle band. Light and shadow chased one another in every convex and contour of his muscles. The slumped posture jammed the head of his cock into his abs and how could a task so mundane look so goddamn lurid? Like that male pinup magazine she and her high school friends gawked and giggled over. Unlike some of the more laughable poses in _Playgirl_ , this magazine had featured men in their natural element, unposed and unclothed, striking a voyeuristic chord with the viewer. And the ex-Marine looked like he belonged on one of those pages.

Frank tucked the bands—which she guessed were _boot blousers_ —into a cargo pocket. He draped the fatigues over his boots with care. His sloe gaze lifted and the breath stanched in her lungs.

"C'mere" he beckoned without an accompanying gesture.

And she went. Her legs carried her a few shaky steps to stand between his spread knees. He stared up, his head level with her upper abdomen, his mouth unsmiling yet not unkind. Fixated on his face, she missed the movement of his hands until his touch grazed her bare knees. The abrupt contact startled her. She was as skittish as a racehorse locked in the stall at the starting line. And like a seasoned jockey, he calmed her with his gentle touch rather than soothing words. Blunt fingertips traced twin cords of lithe tendon behind her knees. Knees that were currently liquifying at the joint as she began to tremble again. 

Any other man might have voiced concern or asked after her mood, but Frank wasn't any regular guy. He read her body, her face, probably even scrutinized the cadence of her breath. Which is why he didn't ask for permission, just let his touch venture beneath the robe's hem, glided up the naked flanks of her thighs, and halted below the robe’s knotted sash. All without breaking his hawkish stare.

He tested the physically intimate waters with a few powerful kneads of her bare hip. When she didn’t object, his hands fanned out, rough skin-to-silken skin contact. His pinky finger nudged the upper slope of her derrière and his thumbs nearly brushing the v-shaped cradle of her mound.

Thunder boomed above the storm clouds, the resonant bass of it rattling through the windows as it rattled through her heart. Nerves already overstrung, Karen suffered an absurdly girlish flinch and yelp, but those hands clamped on her naked hips steadied her. She clutched his forearms to avoid toppling like an ill-stacked deck of cards. 

Frank hadn’t flinched at all. “You good now?" 

She nodded in a dull movement, her head feeling light and drugged. 

His hands maintained their firm grip her. They may have even tightened inexorably harder.

"Do you know what I wanted to do to you in that alleyway back in February?" he spoke. “Just because I don’t deserve it, don’t mean I never thought about it.”

She shook her head as sophisticated methods of communication abandoned her.

"Had plenty of time to think about that night. About wedging my knee between your legs and pinning your skirt to the wall. About you riding on my thigh just like you did in this bed earlier. Shit, at least there's some things I can predict with you." He let out a dark chuckle and nuzzled her clothed stomach like the beast he gradually devolved into. "You know how many mornings you had me tossing in my bed, dreaming about ripping that pencil skirt in two pieces, nudging aside your panties and having you ride my cock? Those high heels of yours digging into my ass with every thrust. Your nails clawing my back and teeth on my throat. Days. Nights. Unable scour the image of it outta my head. Drove me goddamn batshit.”

She foundered again and it had nothing to do with the inclement weather. Her knees literally knocked together as warmth poured in a lazy flume between her legs. This time his grip shifted. His palms slid down and frontwards, fingertips spanned over her hipbones, bringing his thumbs dangerously close to the place yearning for his touch. Terry cloth prickled over her tight nipples, the robe almost as stifling as her blanket cocoon had been. Suffocating in her own clothing, her clumsy fingers moved to untie the belt but he stopped her. 

"No." The low command cracked like one of the far off thunderclaps outside. "Just feel it.”

“Frank,” she growled, a register to rival his own. She went for her sash knot again but he captured both her wrists. 

“There’s that hot Irish temper.” A crooked grin broke through the stone on his face and she wanted to hit him. "Don't you dare take this robe off. Unlike a certain impatient woman I know, I can wait to unwrap my gifts. And I’m gonna unwrap you when I'm good and ready. Been waiting all goddamn night. Fuck. Scratch that. I've been waiting all goddamn year to have you.”

Arrogant. Patient. Controlling. Sexually lethal. She really ought to hate him. But how could she when he looked at her like _that_? Some of that hard boiled resolve eased out, converted to the heavy lidded eyes and parted lips of a lover's anticipation, eager for the pleasure he was about to bring her. 

His hands ranged under the robe once more, skimmed the front of her thighs and dragged back, stroking beneath her navel before sliding down into her trimmed hair. Frank’s wandering touch traveled the same expanse of her body in a delicately maddening pattern. Sometimes the strokes were light as a grass blade. Other times hard and heated like a masseur. Every move intended to wind her up another impossible turn tighter. 

And goddamn it worked. 

Worked so well that when he finally grazed his thumb over her clit, she cried out and nearly keeled over on him. Karen managed catch herself on his shoulders this time as he offered little assistance, his hands otherwise preoccupied.

"Keep your hands there. Yeah, on my shoulders. Just like that,” he advised before commanding, "Spread your feet. I meant more than an inch. Wider. Perfect."

"How are you the naked one yet ordering me around?" she said in a voice as brittle as cracked glass. “It always works the opposite way in those harlequin books.”

His only answer was his lopsided smirk. She knew the answer already. It was simple: beasts enjoyed the power in their own nudity. 

Confident she wouldn’t fall on him, Frank moved his thumb over the tight, hot bud, his circular strokes heaving the floor beneath her feet. Karen’s eyes fluttered closed. Her hips countered by jerking forward in shallow, languid thrusts to match his pace. What she assumed was his index finger glided over the pillowy seam of her sex to gather the juices trickling there. 

"Fuck, you’re juicy as ripe peach." Was that awe in his voice? “You ever think about me that way I thought about you?"

She nodded her head, she tried to anyway. 

"Tell me."

The movement of his thumb stilled atop her clit when she disobeyed his command. "Tell me what you thought about or I stop."

She whimpered and shook her head back forth to regain some of her fragmented vocabulary. "The...um...the jail. When I used to visit you to go over your case."

The words flowed at the cost of her eyesight. Her eyelids shut like they had lead weights atop them. So she only heard his reaction through his indrawn breath and the fine shudder racking his shoulders. 

"Elaborate."

"Um...you fucked me."

"Unsat. Elaborate." He pressed down on her clit, provoked a maddening, faint sensation clenched low in her belly.

She took a ragged breath to spare oxygen for her already over taxed brain. "You...got out of your cuffs somehow. And since legal visits aren't monitored, you said you could do whatever you wanted to me and no one would know. But I wanted it. God I wanted it so bad I couldn't breathe around you in those fantasies."

Even now her chest was rising and falling to force air in her lungs. The man was as devastating as an asthma attack. She cracked open her eyes the barest sliver. Tension steeled his face, rigid save for the jaw muscles leaping in his cheeks.

"So I slipped my cuffs and you were down to fuck. Keep going." He rewarded her story so far by resuming his small strokes of her clit.

"The handcuffs...you-you handcuff me to the desk.”

An appreciative groan rumbled up from his chest, deeper and wilder than the others he’d uttered. It was the sound of brutal masculinity knocked to its knees. _Ah. He must have really liked that little detail._ Where Frank outmatched her in physical strength and tireless discipline, she was able to wrest some of his tightly rationed control with her words. Oh, Frank wanted a smutty story. He was going to a get one doozy of a smutty story, one that had kept her company on lonely nights and the occasional idle day.

“When I’m good and cuffed, you bend me over the table. Your hands are solid heat slipping under my clothes and groping my tits. You can't fully undress me because of the cuffs but you do your best. Stripping me, with your hands… your teeth. You let me make my heels on though."

"Damn straight I'd make you keep your heels on."

Yep, she even had dream Frank Castle down pat. 

"Go on." His voice grew increasingly huskier.

"It changes depending on my mood.” Her fingernails raked over his scalp and he leaned into her touch. “Sometimes my skirt and panties are in a heap on the floor and you’re nose deep in my pussy. Or other times you skip the foreplay and just slide every inch of your rock-hard dick inside me from behind. Your rough fingers digging into my hips as you fuck me. But I never see what you look like since...well...I didn't know what was waiting under that prison jumper."

And good God her imagination would have miserably failed her if she tried.

"Mmmm,” he hummed/grunted. His index nudged her labia but didn't breach her, only teased with the idea of it. No, he didn’t get to hold back control anymore. Karen lowered her pelvis, accepting him, sinking her hips and taking him to the first knuckle. 

Frank’s breath grated out in a low swear. “Let me help you with the rest since you’re so eager.” 

He slid his finger inside her sleek heat, delving to the last knuckle and chased by a second digit. _Oh fuck._ Her blood singing in her veins, she slouched forward, buried her nose in short black hair, relishing the commingled scent of burnt cedar, gun powder, unrepentant male, and a nuance of motor oil. Screw Fresh Cut Roses or Bakery Air. Yankee Candle needed to make a candle that smelled like Frank Castle. She'd probably buy a lifetime supply.

"So fucking sexy. Fuckin' cocktease in that jail. Dressed up for this bad, bad man in a sheer blouse, that tight lil skirt hugging your sweet ass, and those goddamn fuck-me heels.” 

"I did not wear fuck-me heels,” she protested weakly. "They were just regular office shoes.”

"Mmmm, well my dick tends to disagree," he spoke, his dark head drifting towards her clothed breasts.

The rough callous of his thumb played over the slick, silken nub. He had workman’s hands. So drastically different than her own supple fingers or even the past touches of past lovers. These were hands roughened by firearm recoil, scraped raw by cement, chafed by desert winds. Who knew such hands remembered how to be gentle? And yet she had a feeling Frank was about to upstage all those other soft-handed men she'd shared her body with. 

He nuzzled the valley between her breasts like some affectionate wild animal learning her scent. Heat rolled off his body and soaked through the terry cloth robe in a constant blaze. So slow it was might kill her, Frank’s nose dipped beneath the robe's lapel, trailing the smooth curve of her breast and she shuddered in an anticipatory shiver. Stubble rasped over the daintily thin skin. With the reverence of man unveiling a shrine, he nudged the neckline aside, bared the porcelain slope to cool air and the avid attentions of his hot mouth. She watched, enthralled by the sight of his lips closing over the tight, pink peak of her breast. He mouthed her tenderly at first. A flick of his tongue on the nub, a gentle suckle along the underslope before teeth bared, nipped her plump flesh like a guard dog's warning bite, a reminder of the strength and ferocity kept at bay as he explored her. Frank merely played, tested, plied for weak spots. Every careful ministration enacted to slowly tear her apart…and holy shit it was working.

Inner muscles clenched around his fingers as if they meant to keep him prisoner. He groaned and gently withdrew before thrusting them back in. His thumb stuttered, altered its pattern to quick flicks which catapulted her to the cusp of shattering. Tension coiled to its snapping point between her legs and between them in general. She’d done it. She busted Frank Castle’s seemingly limitless patience. His free hand slid behind her, clenched and kneaded her ass hard enough to bruise her fair skin. Those thick fingers drove into her folds now, stirring an obscene squelch she’d be embarrassed about if she weren’t so busy burning alive. Frank was determined, possessive, as demanding as only a man called the Punisher was capable. 

“Give it to me, Karen. I wanna hear you,” he ordered. “Soak my fingers with it.” 

Everything unraveled in that one critical instant. Her knees buckled and Frank bore the brunt of her fall, guided her down atop him, his fingers never stilling. Her words spilled in a discordant cry somewhere between agony and ecstasy. Heat flared and lashed out from her womb. An excruciating climax burned pulses through clenched muscles with each convulsion until it was no more than a golden vignette of pleasure, faded but cloaked around her.

It was only when Frank moved to slide his fingers from her body did Karen realize she collapsed atop him, her frame pinning his to the mattress in a boneless, sweaty heap. The robe had shifted, hitched up to her waist by his movement. He hissed at the intimate contact of his scorching skin flush against hers. The hot iron rod his erection dug into her bare hip and the carnal touch jump-started her arousal. She was downright insatiable for this man. 

Karen rolled on her side, or rather slid off of him in a limp bundle as her weak muscles recuperated. 

“Where do you think you’re going?” His hand tangled in the golden hair above her nape and tugged her down to him. He dealt another one of those mind-razing kisses.

She rallied the tatters of her agility, snaked her hand between their bodies to latch onto his hardness. A feedback loop of groan echoed from his mouth into hers. He was heated steel covered in satiny smooth skin and the way he glided in her palm made her feel all-powerful, wanton. 

_I did this to him._ It was a heady thought, drunk on the power she held over his body. The man could order her around all he wanted, but she still held the keys to the castle. _Heh._ Karen stashed away that little pun to laugh about later. 

But before she outright took advantage of him, his larger hand encompassed hers, halting the motion with a squeeze but not removing her grip. She felt her own wetness still coated on his fingers. The other hand remained in her hair, clutched close to the scalp. He pulled her, gently yet inexorably, away to look in her eyes. His own eyes were heavy lidded slits with polished onyx glittering from their deep set. 

Frank's nostrils flared and his tongue swept his lips, looking at her as if she were prime rib waiting to be eaten. 

“Not done with you yet, Irish.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My ex(ish?) husband is home for military leave, so I'm uncertain of how quickly I can post the next chapter. I'm going to shoot for two weeks from now. I really am. You are all wonderful for dealing with my sluggish pace!


	8. Screwed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And this chapter took entirely too long to complete. Sorry about that! Summer vacation is slowly suffocating my writing time. I'm shooting to finish this up in two more chapters...maybe and epilogue as well. already have the next part of the series brewing in my brain!

He was screwed.

And not just screwed in the promisingly filthy sense this evening hurtled towards. No, he was screwed because he saw where this road led them. Careened past all the flashing warning lights and last chance detours. Frank was always six steps ahead of people, its why they either pinned fancy metals on him or died with Frank’s craggy face as their last earthly glimpse this side of life. Even now, he saw those six steps ahead, stomping over the wet cement of the future.

It was too late. He’d damned them both and only he realized it.

_Just one night_ he’d told her as a benefit for himself. Laughable, Impossible. Not only was he screwed, but he was an idiot. _Just one night._ Had it been merely a shitty lie or a shortsighted excuse? Intimacy was a concept he'd wrapped in a ream of barbed wire. He could get to it, but fuck it was gonna hurt, gonna leave its mark on him. This wouldn’t be a _one night_ kind of deal. He’d be back. Or maybe she’d come find him. Regardless of circumstance or common sense, they’d be back in bed, drawn by that gravitational pull of lust and poor decisions. 

And if he were damned, he might as well bask in Hell’s heat.

Her smaller hand clutched him, hot and tight, a satin grip on his cock and a welcome alternative to the coarse rawhide texture of his own fist. Pressure built with her every stroke, his pulse thrumming in his dick as his heart battered against his chest. What little blood hadn’t diverted to his cock thundered in his temples. Was this what a heart attack felt like? Fuck it. There were worse ways to die. One thing for sure, he'd never live down the embarrassment of blowing his load in her palm like some feckless teenage boy getting his first hand-job. His aching balls had no problem with what male pride forbade. They offered up their customary warning. A single, sticky drop of pre-cum beaded on the head and then spattered on his chiseled stomach. 

Staving off humiliation, Frank closed his hand over hers, stilling the sweetly persuasive caress. “Not done with you yet, Irish.”

Karen’s gaze met his own, those up tilted eyes glossed and darkened like tropical tide pools. She had no fucking clue how _not done_ with her he really was. One hand still fastened atop hers, his fingers toyed with the stubborn knot keeping her robe closed. Her skin had slid in silken mystery beneath the terry cloth as he explored her through touch alone, but now he _needed_ to see her. The silent question passed between them.

“Don’t need to ask me,” she spoke, the humor trickling through the weave of taut nerves. “I wanted this fucking thing off ten minutes ago.”

He chuckled, or at least he tried to. It may have come out in a growl. Without further deliberation, Frank unbound the knot. He peeled back the fabric, his every movement carried weight, building, sealing them in block by block until escape was futile. 

Goosebumps prickled over a moon pale skin, skin that glowed in the soft lamp light, skin that wanted for his tongue, his lips. _Easy._ Frank let his gaze wander as recklessly as his mouth yearned to do so. Keeping the robe on had been a smart move. A man of weaker fortitude would’ve cracked, thrust between those thighs with little consideration for her pleasure or his lack of practice. 

_Slow._ He trailed his touch up her stomach, ascended the lowerslope of her breast to trace a light circle around her nipple. Colored the same dark coral as her lips, it was still damp from his earlier attentions. Karen drew a serrated breath beneath him as the tight nipple clenched tighter. Her warm body writhed atop the pale green robe spread beneath, tousled waves of gold tossed against the pillow. 

_More beautiful than an asshole like you deserves to look at, let alone touch._

His blunt fingers looked crude atop the pearly canvas, unworthy. Dark hands—their knuckles mottled with old bruises—drifted over the pale curves and delicate contours of bone and muscle. Everything about her was absolute perfection yet so precariously breakable, fragile to a man versed the vulnerabilities of a human body. Breath, bone, and blood. He was squeamishly aware of how little pressure it took to break her dainty collar bone, how easily a knife slid beneath the base of the sternum for a quick death, how much he prized the pulse fluttering in the hollow of her bruised throat. And for the first time in a long damn while, the knowledge Frank plied to kill others rattled him. How dare everyone he cherished be so goddamn fragile. 

Reluctant to spoil the mood, he shook off such bleak thoughts, his footprints well trampled where their crooked paths led. Frank was _here_ now. In _her_ bed. Beside _her_ body. All his ghosts dwelled out there in the storm, beyond the constant drum of rain against the window pane. All the horrors of his sins and their tragedies pressing dull pins to a bubble of tranquility ready to burst by morning. He compartmentalized this moment, this night, away from them all. This moment remained isolated, existed outside their fucked up lives, one shining instant slipped between the cracks of misfortune.

His gaze wandered back to her face, finding her kiss-reddened mouth twisted beneath his avid attention. An attention Karen must’ve mistook as scrutiny instead of affection. Those irrational insecurities likely the leftover baggage of past lovers. _Bastards._ He traced the gentle arc of her ribcage. Frank was no poet, but he’d try to express his desire for her dignity’s sake.

“You’re there best thing I’ve seen in a long time. Better than I deserve to see. I mean, fuck, you look exactly like…” he bit off the words and shook his head. “Never mind. It’s stupid.”

She threaded her fingers through black hair barely long enough to do so. “Like what? You have to tell me now or else I’ll torture it from you. Fair warning, I can be pretty ruthless when I set my mind to it,” she threatened sweetly, her anxiety gone, and flashed him a coy smile.

“Alright, don’t expect me to remember names or anything, but there’s that painting with the blonde chick on the clam shell.” He chuckled to himself and shook his head. “Shit, that sounds worse outside my mouth than it did in my head.”

“Birth of Venus? By Boticelli?” Her cheeks flushed hot recalling the painting. 

“Rings a bell. But something…” he raised himself onto his knees to drink in the sight of her again. “Your skin, your hair, even the curve of your neck against the open robe…never really saw what the fuss was about, but now you’re here, looking like you just stepped down from that painting.”

_Now you just sound like some sappy asshole._ What did he know of art beyond the crimson spatter of blood or the black print of obituaries?

He never understood art. At best he gave it a half-hearted 3 seconds of admiration, at worst it annoyed him. The pointlessness of it. Pretty pictures to distract a world gone ugly. But now he got it. His busy brain aways evaluating, accounting every nuance, logging every threat, snagged upon every minute, making multi-choice scenarios out of every interaction like a shitty choose-your-own-adventure. But now he got it. Karen just _was_. No analysis required. Beyond beautiful. Beyond gorgeous. Brought the color back to his stale world. Above all those pathetic compliments and mushy garbage spun by men with diplomas when they aim to impress a woman.

But Frank was a man of few words and sparse shame, so he took action. Her legs spread wide, loosely crooked, her pelvis canted to a silent request of his hands. He used his mouth for acts other than words, and women seemed to prefer it that way. His lips dragged along the backs of her silken thighs, tender grazes up then back down, teased her with a little nip on the curve of her amazing ass. He could still taste the bathwater on her skin mixed with the intoxicating musk of her juices.

“Gonna taste you now, Irish. You smell so sweet. Wanted to lick you right off my fingers.” Frank gave her a pinch of teeth on her inner thigh. His dog tags dangled from his neck. He adjusted them to hang between his shoulder blades and out of the way.

At first he went slow. Little flicks of his tongue, the gentlest nibbles on her plumped lips, he’d even utilized his scruffy chin in a few of those teasing passes. He wanted to dip lower, but figured it was a bit too kinky for their first time. Frank had developed some pretty kinky tastes over the years, but he could also play nice. It just so happened that tormenting women with delicious touches as they whined was one of those kinky tastes. 

By her high, whining cries, Karen was properly tormented. Her lithe fingers twisted in the sheets. Long thighs trembled like a rung tuning fork under his hands and he hadn’t even begun to play with her yet. All too pleased at the reaction he stirred, Frank lifted his mouth, letting his wet lips hover scant inches over the pink jut of her clit. His stare locked hers over the creamy terrain of her body. Those slanted eyes had gone slightly wild, feral, perhaps even a bit pissed off. Slender fingers buried in his hair and her hips surged up on impulse, outright demanded he satisfy her. 

Even in bed, Karen wasn’t going to take his bullshit and that made him throb harder.

Riled from his self-restraint and her eagerness, he unleashed his hunger. Feverishly glutted himself on the taste of her pussy, his adept tongue spearing into her folds. He chased lazy circles around the bulb. Stoked more of those little sounds from Karen, plaintive noises that shot through his ears, melted down his back, and settled in his painfully hard dick, his brain melting down with it. Working her nerves like a delicate instrument, he sucked her clit, the rigid edge of his teeth exerting the faintest pressure on her hood as his tongue-tip laved a pattern. Lick after lick, her body trembled as her mind unspooled to tangle in her nerves. Frank kept her there, primed, trilling on a hair trigger, prisoner to the wet glide of his tongue. Her hips jerked to steal whatever friction she could, anything to finally send her over the edge for the second time tonight. 

She cried out for him and cursed him with in the same jagged breathes. Nails raked along the curve of his scalp, scuttered a shiver down his spine. Fuck, this woman was going to bleed him and his neglected cock throbbed at the bloody prospect. Pleasure. Pain. He’d take whatever she dealt.

“Frank…” his name quivered of her lips. “Frank…oh God…please…”

His lips lifted from her slick heat, his words came in humid gusts against her hypersensitive flesh. “Please what? Tell me. Wanna hear you say how badly you want me to make you come.”

She somehow managed to crack open one eye, the warm blue a sliver between her dark lashes. The flush on her cheeks spread down her neck to blot her chest. Alabaster flesh rosy from cheeks to nipples. His tongue slid over his lips, hungry for the sight of her so damn disheveled. 

Mischief glimmered in the depths of her dark, glassy stare. “First, you’re going to make me come with your mouth. Then I want to put that fat cock inside me. Fill me up with it. Give me something to think about it when I’m lonely at night or sitting at my desk.” A coy little smile played on her full lips, the guile worthy of the siren about to lure him to ruin.

Those words, dangerous slipping past those lips, scrambled his brain like a goddamn EMP. Frank held preternaturally still save for the muscle ticking in his jaw. Fuck. The dominant streak he’d held at bay strained and snarled for freedom. 

Galvanized, Frank sealed his mouth over her glistening bud of nerves and redoubled his attentions. He’d giver her everything she asked for and wreck her with it. His hand shot up, latched onto her breast, plucked at one of her pebbled nipples. He thrust two fingers in her clenched pussy, groaned against her sopping cleft as those muscles fluttered and snapped down on his intruding digits. 

With his hands no longer pinning them down, those luscious thighs closed over his head, inadvertently trapping him in a sweet, pillowy cage. The woman damn near smothered him by the time she came. Frank kept licking and suckling through her throes, ignoring the heels digging into his back. She was at the mercy of his mouth and Frank wasn’t feeling particularly merciful. As quick as she trapped him, Karen tried to dislodge his mouth from her ambushed flesh, her shaky hands tugged weakly at his hair, urging Frank to ease off.

“Too much…Frank, it’s too much.”

 

****

 

He didn’t stop once she came. Refused her precious time to bask in the afterglow of her second foundation-rattling orgasm, instead he drowned her in it. Finally, Frank left her with one last sloppy suck on her overstimulated clit before he climbed up to maul her mouth, pushing the taste of her own juices past her lips. It was heady flavor, like a slow, warm pull from mulled wine. The iron rod of his prick ground into her flank, the rigid flesh so hot she expected it to sizzle against her dewy skin.

“Someone’s got the brass of a drill sergeant.” His damp stubble chafed her lips as he spoke, his tone humored but husky. “Look at you. Dealin’ orders like I’m some green cadet under your authority. What happens if I disobey your direct orders, ma’am?”

A quiet little thrill shot through her when he called her _ma’am_. “If fucking me is a lousy task then I guess I’ll just relieve you of the duty.” She pretended to squirm away from him and met the impasse of body. He gathered her fast in his arms. Karen allowed herself to be captured in the warm embrace of hard muscle, a long-awaited refuge in a caress.

“Uh uh. You ain’t goin’ anywhere, ma’am. Got my mission to carry out. Priority.” He looked down at her, his face set in those hard lines but his eyes heated, hungry for her. A faint smattering of her juices still dappled his chin from his earlier feasting.

How could a single look reignite her libido? She congratulated and scolded her past self for not wrapping her legs around the man the first time after his trial. _Just a little slip of discretion and you might have been riding this man through substantially less lonely nights._ Problem was she’d never want to get off the ride. Karen followed the unsettling thought to the small catastrophes of her mind’s own make. Crisis knocked her inwardly out of phase. She lived in the moment yet acknowledged the imminent future that threatened tomorrow. _Tomorrow._ What a frightening word.

Her anxiety must have been catching because Frank’s smug expression faltered just a bit. His mouth quirked and the wolfish gaze dodged direct eye contact. “You on birth control? Not like either of us need that brand of complication in our lives right now.”

Her mind, still hazy from two amazing climaxes, tripped over the answer. Karen struggled to remember something as simple as if she was on birth control or not. But with her life was ruled by deadlines and word counts, contacts and references, she could barely remember to eat lunch let alone take a daily pill. She shook her head.

“Shit.” Frank rolled off her and got to his feet as if he needed to wedge that space between them. “I don’t got any rubbers on me.”

She laughed. She had to laugh at how a man who stocked a small arsenal of guns, a ridiculous amount of hidden blades, all manner of military gear, a soldier ready for any situation, didn’t carry a single condom. 

He scowled but the stony look wavered with his own amusement. “Not polite to laugh at a naked guy. Might hurt my feelings.”

Karen laughed harder, conscious of how his eyes locked onto her breasts as she did so. “At least one of us is prepared for impossible circumstances. Check the top drawer of my nightstand.” The fog of lust lifted long enough to remember what _else_ she kept in that drawer. "Umm actually, wait, I’ll get—“

But he'd already pulled the drawer open. The salacious item rolled across the bottom to eagerly present itself and a conflicting sense of mortification seized Karen. Frank’s eyebrows hiked up in mild surprise accompanied by the crooked tilt of his lips. 

"Jealous?" Karen tried to recoup the situation with humor despite her hot cheeks.

“As long as you don't expect mine to vibrate, I ain’t.” He unleashed the full scope of his smirk, nudging her vibrator out of the way to pluck out the condoms. “‘Sides, mine’s water-proof and don’t need batteries. So I got that going for me."

She listened to the foil crinkle open and took renewed interest in the ceiling, which was rather silly being she’d palmed his erection with her own hands, had felt the weight and the blistering heat of him and longed to feel it again. But she avoided the ritual all the same. _Hardly a time to act like a prude._

When he was finished with the essentials, he knelt there between her thighs, dark and rugged, dog tags gleaming on his chest, looking like some forsaken offspring of a war god. His latex-covered cock put a mild damper on the insanely erotic image, but he was right. Neither of them could chance creating anything besides memories this night. Now that latex nudged her intimate folds as he took his penis in hand. Frank slicked the blunt tip with a few tantalizing strokes along her slit, aligning himself to push into her body.

_Here’s where he’ll lose control._ Like those other men who just pistoned right in with the single-minded focus of their own pleasure over hers. Not that she really had room to complain as he’d given her two mind-numbing climaxes with his hands and tongue. She’d left entire relationships with fewer orgasms than what he’d given in a single night. 

Yet contrary to her expectations, Frank eased himself inside, inch by girthy inch, patiently letting her body surrender peacefully to the invading force. The man was so keenly disciplined that when he sheathed half-way inside, he withdrew to rub his glans along her slippery cleft in prolonged tease. Or torment. With him it could very well be both. 

Her nails gouged crescents in his forearms. “Are you trying to kill me?!” Her voice came in reedy desperation coupled with a demand. “I want you inside me. Now. All of you. Quit stalling and give me every fucking inch.”

“Careful what you ask for, ma’am.” The quicksilver smirk dissolved as swift as it appeared. 

He plunged inside in one devastating thrust, his hips bottoming out with a loud smack. The bed frame jolted beneath them and thunder boomed through the storm outside. Choking on a groan, Frank buried his face into the juncture of her neck, his body stock still except for the pulsing length lodged between her legs. 

"Fuck, you feel so good...so goddamn good,” he said, a thready voice that made Karen feel like the goddess of sex incarnate.

Slowly, he moved within her. His large hands glided up her arms, coaxing them above her head where the couple intertwined fingers. He held her there, the grasp gentle yet unbreakable, his hips rising and falling as he sank inside her folds again and again. The tip of his nose nudged her neck, each breath a sultry wisp over her own torrid skin. His parted lips migrating to her shoulder and sank his teeth there hard enough to leave marks but not draw blood. Scruff rasped the over the twin ridges of her collarbone before his mouth slanted over hers once more. Frank came back to life with the steady rock of his hips, the calloused grasp clamped beneath her knees, and the drag of his dog tags across her chest.

Her whining moans muffled into his mouth with every impact of his body. He felt bigger than he had looked, filled her to the brim, soaked her sensitive tissue with a pleasant, stretching ache she’d gladly feel for days. Karen was trapped between the yielding mattress top and the hard, hot press of the body above her. Changing position, Frank tilted her hips, propped her ankles on his strong shoulders, the drastic angle taking him impossibly deeper.

Apparently Frank wasn’t a fan of traditional missionary. Thanks to his impressive upper body strength, he maneuvered her body as if she were as heavy as a rag doll. Both her ankles ended up braced on his left shoulder. One thick arm wrapped around her thighs as the other secured her calves, binding her legs together with his own brute strength. The sultry sensations sealed in, heightened, intense like lighting trapped in a jar. She felt every inch of his cock drag out before ramming back to fill her, oblivious that he tugged her hips up and off the mattress until her stomach burned from the strain. A good burn too. Way better than any gym routine and definitely more satisfying. Sex with Frank was her new favorite workout.

Awarness pared away to the heat of their bodies, the wet smacks of their flesh meeting. Their scent mingled, strengthened as the sweat sheened then dappled their skin like a newly broken fever. In that trick of primordial alchemy, her senses twisted, meshed from what was _him_ and what was _her_ to the essence of _them_. No more dirty talk, no room for snark or second thoughts. Just the beauty and the brutality of the oldest connection known to humankind. 

She felt it again, that coiling sensation winding tighter with every thrust. But gauging the way Frank’s breath grated through clenched teeth, she’d miss the chance to ride her third peak of hot bliss.

“Oh, fuck.” Frank’s expression contorted and pinched. “Can’t…I’m gonna—“

Although he looked like a demigod, the man above her proved mortal. His pace staggered, stuttered from its grueling tempo as his arms banded tighter on her legs. And watching him break, witnessing that stoic façade crumble to reveal the raw animal beneath, had to be the hottest thing she’d ever seen. The look on his face of anguish-laced euphoria. Unguarded. Truly naked. His head lolled back, bared the chorded column of his throat with a hoarse grunt. Frank shuddered and pulsed inside her as he emptied into the condom. She felt faintly cheated by the slim barrier separating their bodies.

Still kneeling, his chest rose and fell with every choppy breath as if he’d just finished a marathon. His tight grip slackened from her legs, letting them slide down his sweat slicked body and splay limp on either side of his hips. Frank wiped thick beads of perspiration off his face with one hand as the other absently stroked her thigh. Broad shoulders slumped forward, that impervious military posture slouched as he gazed down at her, attention enthralled by whatever he saw in her own messy tremors and ragged breath.

Karen gave him one more blissfuly weak smile. She clenched her inner muscles on his flagging, spent length, knocking the soldier from his stupor.

Frank bowed over top of her prone body, his lips pressed to her mouth for a quick kiss. “Gonna go take care of this.”

She raised her eyebrow, confused.

_This_ apparently meant the condom. With the caution of an EOD specialist, he reached between their bodies, his fingers clinching around the latex lip as he drew out of her body. The mattress lifted with his absent weight. He lumbered off to the bathroom, the flex of his athletic thighs and ass mesmerized her in the same fashion jiggling breasts held their own enchantment. She loved and hated watching that man walk away. Especially when the bathroom door shut behind him.

The world suddenly felt larger, quieter. Karen took the brief privacy to marshal her thoughts from where they scattered. _Alright, so let’s do a quick recap: You were nearly blackmailed, two psychopaths tried to kill you, you might have killed one of those psychopaths, you kinda hope you killed the psychopath, your problematic ex came to the rescue, then he left to fetch the only other man in the city more problematic than himself, you sobbed, Frank comforted you, and then he fucked your brains into an upper echelon of being._

Well, Karma was certainly in a mercurial mood tonight.

That bar of light below the bathroom door went black. Frank reappeared, still magnificently naked, and Karen’s train of thought once again went fuzzy at the edges. Because she was treated to far more alluring points of interest, she didn’t notice the the wash cloth he held. Without question or comment, he gently swabbed the warm, damp cloth between her legs, wiping away the chemical smell of the spermicide and the faint soreness of her folds. 

“Full-service, huh?” she joked, the words hoarse from doing something other than panting or moaning.

The left corner of his lip raised but his eyes remained downcast, focused on his task. “Only cause we used a rubber. Otherwise I’d probably hold your legs apart just to watch my jizz trickle out of you.”

A simmering pulse of arousal flared at the tender, slippery juncture of her thighs. “Well, fuck me. You are a bad, bad man.”

He looked up from his ministration. A drop of something dark and thrilling spilled in his eyes. “Nah. If I were a real bastard, I’d forbid you from cleaning up or putting your clothes back on. Tell you that the only thing I wanna see you wearing is my cum leaking down your thighs.” 

Frank Castle was either the best or the worst thing to every happen to her to bed. Time had yet to decide.

After he discarded the wash cloth and she took her own turn in the bathroom, Frank switched off the lamp. Outside, the storm dwindled, exhausted its fury until it pattered the window in soft droplets. The sensually addictive man slid into bed and pulled the cotton sheet over them. Karen nuzzled his bulk. She succumbed to long lost feeling of another body’s drowsy warmth and the safety that embrace offered. Her fingers trailed up his chest and curled around his dog tags as if she meant to rein him there, keep him from slipping off and disappearing before sunrise. Sated and still a little sore, she fell into a blissfully dreamless sleep.


	9. Between the Blessed and the Damned

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally! Sorry this took so damn long. Homestretch of summer and the school year can't get here fast enough for this momma. 1 more chapter and an epilogue to go! Thanks for reading!

Regardless of the comfy bed and comfier body beside him, restlessness cared little for the change in venue and invited his addled nerves along for a sleepover. Frank stared up at the ceiling, busied his busy mind by watching the shadows shrink and the darkness stain blue in predawn light. Really, had he expected to drop off into a sound, peaceful slumber just because he enjoyed some damn fine sex and cozy company? 

Yea. Alright. Maybe he kinda did. Hoped to at the least. No wonder he reserved little hope for anything more than survival these days. Perhaps he oughta be glad the Punisher kept his mouthy trap shut.

But the problem with being Frank was, well, he was Frank. Short of a rum runners cache of alcohol or a strong kick to the head, there was no way he could step outside his head. He might’ve taken the night off, but the cold routine of his stray miseries were unceasing in their duties. Mangy beasts with fangs stropped by guilt that gnawed at his conscience, chomped ragged tunnels until they mined back into his soul and curled up in their homey burrows. Venomous little voices tainting the hard fought peace of the prior few hours. 

_Well, that was fucking quick._ Good ol’ Catholic guilt joined with survivor’s shame into a volatile machine, a fucked-up Voltron of self-reproach. If you’re happy and you know it that’s a sin, because how dare you be happy as others suffer, while the people you love are dead. Piece of shit.

What stillness she grounded him in now vibrated as a locus point, only quelled by her touch, her smile, those slender fingers settling his demons to rest. 

He oughta wake her. Someone else to fill the silence when his mind crowded it with emotional run off, a floe of ugly thoughts to match torrent of his ugly deeds. But what awaited at the other side of her waking troubled him worse than anything his troubled conscience coughed up. 

Frank was no romantic. A single sleep was all it might take for Karen to come to her senses, for whatever this was to fizzle. Flame at night became ash by morning. Beyond cool disregard, beyond a soured aftertaste, she’d probably hate him for this. He took little consolation that at least she’d never hate him as much as he hated himself. 

Whatever lay on the other side of her doze, he respected the peace of her sleep…Or so he assumed by the how the stress lines smoothed from her face as if they’d never creased there to begin with. Dark sweeps of her eyelashes fanned her pale cheeks, the eyelids closed but inert from a dreamless slumber. Her lips parted, allowing shallow breaths to draw in and the occasional clipped snore or whimper to escape. All the hallmarks of a deep, blissful respite. Distant from the terror of this night and whatever else plagued her days. A sleep of angels. A sleep he envied because he'd never sleep like that again until he was dead. 

How easily this woman slept next to a monster. 

What unnerved him most, out of all the warring emotions and conflicting logics, was that this felt sane. More sane than anything had felt in the past year. As sane and compulsory as the rush of blood through his arteries and the breath in his lungs. He’d been drowning in a welter of conflict but now he let the tide take him, too tired to fight it any longer. 

Sure, the situation wasn’t close to convenient or ideal. _Or smart,_ his cold logic chimed in. But she was tough and he had a chauvinistic tendency of doubting that feminine grit.

In the early morning quiet of the room, his stomach growled so loud that Karen winced in her sleep. Shit, even his appetite was coming back from the dead. Hunger, the edible kind, griped for food with taste, perhaps even something sugary. Christ. What had gotten into him?

As discreetly as he could pull off, he slipped out of bed, stirring the scents infused in the sheets with a gentle rustle of his escape. The delicate fragrance of her lavender was overpowered by his heady stench, the potent sweat and musk of a man accidentally scent marking his territory. Frank was in dire need of a shower. 

He’d been absently sniffing his armpit when Karen rolled over, her body claiming the vacated spot where he had lain. Asleep, she nuzzled her nose into the pillow. A little smile curled her lips.

Alright so maybe he didn’t stink _that_ bad.

Frank stood there, watching her, drifting in wakefulness as she drifted in slumber, both dreaming, absorbed in the sight of her until his stomach rumbled once more. Revived lust and an emotion he dared define as contentment, he forgot how fucking annoying hunger could be.

 

***

She dozed, sailed in sleepy half-aware darkness comprised of his musky scent or the occasional shift of his body beside her. Karen felt herself sink into a deeper realm of sleep, a world suffused with Frank’s imprint…

…Only to awaken alone. The white walls of her apartment glowed in light blue hues in the predawn morning. Her filmy curtains were drawn, the scaffolding across the street nothing more than obscure lines and indecisive blocks of color. She had no idea what time it was or even the day of the week, but one thing was for sure: Frank was no longer in bed. For a split second, her stomach twisted up around her heart like a car crash. 

He’d left her. 

_Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Did you really think he’d stay?_

_Yes, because if you look up_ gullibility _on Wikipedia, I’m probably on the citation list._

The tears were still broken promises, a subtle burning in her nose, when she heard a unusual scratching sound. 

_Oh, great. Frank snuck out and now someone finally shows up to off me. At least they’re right on time to put me out of my misery._

More awake than she had been .2 seconds ago, Karen rolled onto her back to face her the rest of her apartment. She froze in place, her breath caught somewhere below her wide eyes and above the somersault of her stomach.

_Welp. A girl definitely doesn’t wake up to that every day._

He was there, dwarfing her already tiny kitchen, his body draped in the milky blue light and shadows of an unrisen sun. Karen blinked away the premature tears, focused on the flex of Frank’s back as he worked at some task unseen. Bunched muscles slid from exertion atop the inverted triangle of his back, liquid smooth beneath the scarred fretwork marred into skin. An oh so hypnotic movement that also emphasized his danger. Unquenched, her clear vision skimmed the valley of his spine, past where it tapered and strayed to the curve of his ass. Alright, maybe it was just as remarkable stationary as it was in motion. Greedy for more of him, her gaze swept the down his thighs and back up, lured again to that perfect ass like a magnet. 

He turned then, as if sensing the tactile heat of her stare, a smooth pivot on his bare heel belonged to instinct as opposed to skill. This entire night had to be some terror-induced stress dream or the afterlife because she, of all people, just got the drop on Frank Castle. The unguarded look on his face exposed the exact moment when his dignity caught up with his soldier’s intuition.

One of the deadliest men she’d ever met stood in her kitchen, naked and scraping a spatula along the inside of a peanut butter jar. Correction. An _almost empty_ peanut butter jar that had been half-full the day prior. Too late for denials, he shoved the thick paste in his mouth, looking entirely boyish as he did so. If she hadn’t witness it with her own eyes, she’d never dream of putting the name _Frank Castle_ and _boyish_ in the same sentence.

“There’s bread on the counter if you’d like a sandwich to go with all that peanut butter,” she suggested sweetly from the bed. 

“Nah. Carbs stick to my thighs. Though I was tempted to wake you up and offer to lick it off some funner places.” Dark eyes locked on her. Frank laved the pink silicone spatula in a way that snipped any tie between him and the word _boyish_. 

A hot, wet pulse shot through her stomach to pool in a part of her that remained faintly sore with the ache of him. “You’re cute and all, but you still owe me a jar of peanut butter, bud.” 

Jar and spatula abandoned on the formica counter, Frank approached the bed, licked lips that had to be genetically engineered to frustrate anyone with a heartbeat. “Could pay you back in other ways. My tongue’s all nice and warmed up now.” 

At that offer paired with that look, the wet heat flared stronger. She was bombarded with the memory of Frank staring up between her open thighs, mouth glistening with her juices, his scruff beaded with it. Such vivid scenes indexed into her mental archive for later dates with her vibrator. _Time to give him a few hot memories of his own._ She sat up, letting the sheet slip and gather in her lap, putting her chosen goods on display.

“But what if I’m hungry too?” Amazing how the right man had the ability to bring out the bad porn dialogue. 

She crawled to the foot of the bed, slinking like a brazen lioness across a savannah of Egyptian cotton and floral coverlet, stalking towards her alpha male. He stood there, waiting, letting her come to him, that sly smirk curving the corner of lip, knowing exactly what she intended and what he had to offer. Or at least she presumed when the exclusively male part of his body rose and twitched over testicles the size of a clenched fist.

With a touch so light it was almost demure, she ran her nails along the sinewy slab of his thigh, chasing the slope up to the deep runnel where thigh met hip. Karen leaned in, poised foursquare on her hands and knees upon the mattress, to plot the stark crease of muscle with her tongue. The man was visual and sensual feast. Inquisitive fingers palmed the heavy sac there, quietly amused that she had the Punisher literally by the balls. Of course she doubted his enemies ever envisioned having them _this_ way.

There were times when going down on a guy seemed little better than a chore, a task toiled through and endured before the fun stuff, but this felt different, gratifying. Charged with the thrill of taming something wild. Nothing like the one-sided foreplay of giver and receiver. With Frank, she was eager to trace every ridge and curve, learn him, explore his shape with her curious mouth. To taste the salt of all that hot, velvety man on her tongue, savor the way her lips stretched to take him, savor everything down to her inelegant sputter as he prodded the back of her throat. Decadent and depraved. And those sensations amplified when she looked up, her gaze meeting his. The heavy-lidded, glossy darkness of his eyes roiled her blood like a flame beneath a delicate glass flask, ready to fracture if heated too fast, too hot. 

Her fingers curled around his firm ass, her nails sketching light marks as he began to buck his hips with shallow, instinctive thrusts. Frank’s iron reserve gradually bent and swaged under her coaxing. Despite how the tableau looked to any voyeur, there was nothing submissive in this act, for Karen felt consummate dominance over the man in her mouth. How couldn’t she when he looked so helpless?

His head lolled back, steel cables of tendons stark in the column of throat. The prominent Adam’s apple bobbed with his groan. “Holy shit.” 

A large palm caught the back of her head, fingers wound into her hair, the encouraging grip bordering on blatant demand. Frank’s penetrating gaze skewered her again, making a riot of her patience and flaming kiln of her womb. She’d’ve been disturbed by such a ruthlessly possessive glare if her own body weren’t dead set on staking a similar claim on him.

“Suckin’ my dick like you’ve been starvin’ for it. You have no idea how fucking sexy you look right now, girl.” 

The flaming arrow of that last word shot straight between her legs and quavered there. How did something so crude sound so damn hot rolling off that gravelly voice? Her groan reverberated up, relaxed her throat, took him deeper until she was nearly choking on the spongy head. She took as much as physically possible into her body while conscious of the aching emptiness between her thighs. 

Her shameless enthusiasm paid off. Whatever impulse Frank clutched tight began to slip its confines. No calculation measured in those eyes, his temper no longer weighing scales upon scales of consequences, all discretion eclipsed by the hyper-focused animal lust. Unthinking, unplanned. As impulsive as killer instinct. Maybe even spiked with a drop of fury. _How dare you do this to me_ meshed with _For Christ’s sake, whatever you’re doing, don’t stop._ This was no rose petal romance, no flowery inspiration for poetry, not when her nose jabbed into the black flare of his pubes, and especially not when he was thrusting so hard that his balls clapped her chin. Yet somehow, it felt like winning a battle, a decisive, ugly victory to turning the war of selves that raged between them. 

Victory was sweet but short. Before she brought him to spill, he dislodged from her mouth, saliva and pre-cum connecting her lips to his head in viscous strands. His broad palm cradled her jaw, holding her in place as his thumb swept along the seam of her mouth, smearing the messy skeins over her swollen bottom lip in a vulgar gloss. Annoyed by his usurpation of her control, she caught the offending thumb between her teeth and retaliated with a warning bite.

“Uh uh…Careful, girl. I can be one mean sunofva bitch if ya push me.” He drew her up from where she’d leaned on all fours, compelled alone by a nudge on her jaw, a nudge that favored command than it tended to persuasion. He held her there, guided her to kneel on the bed. Frank’s nose skimmed down her cheek, his breath a hot trail of fever along her skin, the tender gesture of a beast about to devour her without chewing. The shadows of that dark, ancient creature moved in his eyes.

“Didn’t seem so mean when I had your cock in my mouth,” she provoked, ripping out the composure he had recovered from beneath his feet. “I had you trembling. Another minute and you’d have cum, mewling like a kitten instead of roaring like the lion you think you are.”

Payback for that taunt arrived swift but it was worth every syllable. His hand clenched against her scalp, tangled fine blonde locks in rough fingers as he tugged Karen up for a kiss. If you could call it that. The deed that blossomed as a kiss yet wilted with his mouth mashed to hers, mauling her red lips with stubble and a scratch of teeth. The sweet aftertaste of peanut butter and the malt flavor of the beer she hadn’t seen him drink seeped over her tastebuds, fusing with the salty, musky tang of his cock.

Then he was pulling her off the mattress, on to her feet. One hand spun her by the shoulder before shoving her down on the bed, a rushed maneuver that folded her forward at the waist. 

“Bend over. Want your cheek pressed to that mattress, girl.” It hadn’t been a request.

She watched across a field of rumpled sheets as Frank stalked to the other side of the bed. Once there, he yanked open her nightstand drawer so hard she thought he’d rip the damn thing off the rails. The man was simply not made for dainty furniture. He paused only to pluck out the vibrator, considered it before glancing at her. She must look a picture, bent over, probably looking utterly ravished and waiting only for him. Whatever thought tempted Frank, he shook his head, evidently deciding against it, and stowed the vibe back in its secret place.

This time she watched him roll on the condom, her view obscured through a veil of her hair. Frank rounded the bed once again. His barely audible footsteps prowled behind her and there he remained, unmoving for what felt like a slice of eternity.

An unexpectedly gentle hand brushed her hair off her back, gathered it to fall in a golden skein on the mattress, granting him an uninhibited view of her from nape to rear. The stare of a man enjoying what’s his. Warm, rugged hands traveled the plunging curves of her flank. He murmured something indecipherable, lost in the pounding of her heart and his own low tone. 

“You ready for this, girl?” He fondled the slope of her ass, giving the twin cheeks a firm squeeze.

Voice twined to the debilitating need moored low in her belly, all she managed was a whimper and nod.

He scolded her with a clucking sound heeled by a stinging spank. A sharp jolt shot through her nerves and Karen found her voice real quick after that.

“Frank!” The jolt of arousal outpaced the heat of anger.

“And she speaks,” he said and she heard the smugness in his voice. He rubbed and soothed the heated flesh on her cheek. Frank knew how to pair sensory stimulation like sommelier paired fine wines.“Tell me. Wanna hear it. Tell me you’re ready for me.”

“I want you.” She met his gaze from the corner of her eyes, the heat of her stare stirring all that was volatile and needy between them. “Want you so bad I feel like it’s burning me up inside. Please.”

“This what you want?” His fingertip traced her plump seam down to linger on her clit. He began to stroke the engorged nub in deft little circles.

Body craving any stimulation it could get, she pushed back into the tempting touch. But as sweet as the sensation burned, she wanted more. Karen shook her head, cheeks flushed and the words straining against her lips to reform into lucid speech. “In me. Want you inside me. All of it.”

It was absurdly frustrating but she loved every second of it. The thrill of anticipation heavy in her blood. Anticipation that enhanced the feeling of his cock sliding into her body as if she’d taken mind altering drugs. He sank inside her, filled every inch she gave until she felt his the weight of his balls bump her mons.

“Better than the first time,” he said in husky, reverent tone. “So fucking good around my cock, girl.”

Her hips bore back to meet his thrusts, impelled by Frank’s impatient grasp on her waist as she answered the pitiless rhythm he blazed. Pleasure mounted and pulsed, the hot, ecstatic waves in a building monsoon coming to wreck her. The stiff legs that kept Karen upright trembled and put her in danger of pitching forward in a weak mess of limbs. But as soon as she showed the first hint of toppling, his arm was there, curled around her waist and hoisted her up, drawing her into the mercy and prison of his own burly embrace.

She listened to his harsh grunts and her mouth matched with plaintive moans, softer but no less needy. Frank’s hand slid up the front of her body, groping her breasts and plucking at her nipples before sliding north to press over the fragile wings of her collarbones.

If he were anyone else, if this were any other situation, she might have been scared. As Karen had him by the balls earlier, now the Punisher had her by the throat. The large hand clasped over the delicate network of airways and arteries so vital her health, his grip unrelenting yet mindful of the watercolor splotch of bruises that already mottled her sensitive skin. It was only a taste. A hint. A reminder of the physicality he possessed. A ghost of compression without the threat of one. 

Frank steadied her, kept her back flush to his front with the force of the hand on her neck. Leave it to sex to transfigure another man’s violence into a lover’s affection. She gave the violence that bruised her throat a fleeting regard before Frank erased it, replaced the terror with his passion, rewriting trauma into adoration.

His heart beat against her back like a revved engine.

“You’re gonna cum for me this time, girl. Squeeze and gush all over my cock.”

No need to demand. As far as her body was concerned, Karen didn’t have a choice in the matter. She felt the unstoppable force of an exploding star at the pit of her being. How could these calloused fingers and the rough thrusts summon such cosmic exuberance? The pleasure and demand, fusing and fracturing out, coursed from a sacred epicenter she’d lose sense of after the climax receded. She took heaping gulps of the sensory overload, glutting herself on the sublime savagery of him. Her nails gouged and clawed Frank’s nape and forearm, desired simultaneously to tear him shreds and never let him go.

His guttural cry joined hers. Praise spewed in blunt syllables and curses before they both collapsed atop the mattress wearied, sweaty jumble. And that’s where they laid in their sliver of paradise between the blessed and damned. His weight pinned her, the mass of muscle and male slanted just enough off center that Karen could still catch her breath. Small, faints kisses glanced the back of her neck, her hair, her shoulders as if in unasked apology for his prior roughness.

He moved, the ripple of muscle telling that he was about to get up and take care of the condom. At least that’s what he’d intended before some awful bout of vulnerability seized her. Maybe the blame lie with the retroactive emotional arrears of the past half-hour? People like her and Frank didn’t fuck like that and not experience some absolution or consequence of soul-scouring catharsis.

“Don’t go.” She clutched his wrists in a feeble attempt to pin them down. And it had worked, primarily in part to Frank’s cooperation. “Stay here. You don’t have to leave just yet.”

“It’s alright. I’m right here, Karen.” His hands absently stroked her fingers. “I’m not leaving. Just wanted to ditch the condom before I make a mess of your bed.”

The same man who had had her by the throat, who dealt those obscene demands and vulgar compliments, now soothed and whispered to Karen. Comforted as her fizzling fireworks of senses drifted down from the stratosphere from where he’d shot them.

“But you’re going to leave after that.” 

“Last I checked, my truck didn’t turn into a pumpkin by sunrise,” he said in her ear and they both chuckled.

*****

"You got a 'I have you where I want you smile,'" Frank remarked, his voice still thready from disuse. He cleaned up again and slipped back under the covers, back to the sanctuary where he had no right to dwell but would savor as long as she’d allow. 

"What?" Artless and beautiful, Karen lifted her head from his chest. Frank felt the heat patch bloom on his chest where her cheek had rested. 

"An _I have you where I want you smile._ I've seen you use it before when your lawyer buddies pull some of that clever legal voodoo out of their asses. Or when you’re finished dressing down some poor bastard, in the ass-chewing sense of the phrase anyway. And shit, it was hot then, but I never imagined how fucking hot it'd be in bed." He tucked her hair behind her ear and the aptly named smile made another appearance. "Ah, there it is."

Her fingers distracted from his keen observation and the pink flush it’d brought on, brushed over the faded lines of blueish black ink inscribed on his chest.“What’s this?”

She meant the tilted globe, anchor, and eagle of the Marine corp logo with the script DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR USMC circling it. Frank made the muscle leap up with a clench of his pectoral. She giggled. He loved to hear her giggle.

"Like the ink? Got my dumb-ass 19 year-old self to thank for that one." 

"You regret it? I mean, at least you’re fortunate enough that all the words are spelled correctly."

“A misspelling woulda at least made it unique. Gave it character. Shit, I might as well have walked in that off-base tattoo parlor and asked for generic jarhead tat number 5."

“At least you knew exactly what you wanted to do with your life. I was scuffling between majors when I was nineteen. Did you always want to join the Marines?”

“Knew I wanted to do something like that. Be brave. Go into dodgy situations where not many people would willingly go. When I was kid, I used to take the trash can lid, you know, the round metal ones, and pretend to be Captain America. Drove my father crazy when he could never find the lid to the can.”

A mule’s kick of memories hit low his stomach but he did his best to ignore the fallout. Fortunately Karen gave him an out. Her touch drove the demons out and held back the wrath of the angels. He could just exist with her, unfazed, unplagued by the drudgeries of his own mind, if only for a little while.

“I bet your mother was proud of your accomplishments.” She’d read his file, had studied his life, of course she knew to speak of his mother in past tense.

“Funny enough, my ma wanted me to be a priest." Her shoulder quaked in restrained laughter and he squeezed the plush mound of her ass to tease her. “Glad you think it's funny, cause I didn’t at the time. She kept pushing me to go to seminary school. Guess she saw a Monsignor Castglione in our family's future, complete with my own cathedral. Broke that poor woman's heart the day I enlisted in the Corps."

Karen propped up on her elbow, her beauty effortless in a way no stylist could ever recreate. "So that wasn't just some made up name then? For the flowers I mean." Her blue gaze flicked to the vase of wilted white roses he sent her months ago.

"Changed it after I graduated Reconn school out of Little Creek." His shoulders lifted and fell beneath her hand. "Only my grandmother called me Francis growing up and anyone else did so to mock me. And the further I got in special training, the more frequent it’d been suggested that I change my last name, protect my identity to protect my family." He chuckled at something. "Maria dogged me about that. We dated in high school but ended up breaking up before I enlisted. Said that she'd never date Frank Castglione ever again so of course I'd go and change my name just to be a smart-ass.”

"You were with her a long time. Um, have ever..." Her attention dodged to his tattoo as she chewed her lip, the question stubborn to come out.

"Been with anyone else?" he finished, flashing her a wry smile to let her know her curiosity hadn't overstepped any bounds. "Just cause my mother wanted me to be a priest didn't mean I lived like one. There were a two other girls in high school, and more than there oughta have been when I was going through advanced training. But what's a guy gonna do after being billeted around other testosterone infused marines from reveille to lights out? He's gonna get stupid on weekend liberty and end up with some woman looking to marry his pay grade. So yeah, there were a lot of those before I wised up.”

Once he'd started talking, he was unable to stop, the memories spouting out like a broken tap. "Then I came back home for R&R before Scout sniper school, and there she was. I was walkin’ down the street in my service uniform, seabag slung over my shoulder, fresh off a Greyhound, and Maria came strolling by. Shit, I didn’t think she’d give me the time of day, but she stopped, kept staring at my chest. At the name embroidered there.” He smiled at that. He was doing more smiling tonight than he’d done in the past year that his cheeks hurt. “And I'm just standing there like a jackass. She says _Castle, huh? You must have really been desperate to get back in my pants._ ” 

Where those tears prickled the inner corners of eyes? Impossible. He didn't have them anymore. Instead he sniffed and started a hole into the floral blanket. Phantom fingers give his heart a quick twist. Both for thinking about his dead wife and then for speaking her name as he lay in bed with another woman. _Shit, I've been outta the game too long._

"I'm an asshole. I shouldn't be talking about her. Not with you."

Karen’s fingers brushed along the back of his scalp before she gently tilted his jaw to face her. "You seem happy when you talk about her. No reason to stop doing it."

He scoffed at that. 

“I’m serious. People don't understand when you lose close family, those who are in your lives everyday for decades. Family members who define who you are just by their presence in your life." She shook her head, a sheen of tears glazing over her bright blue eyes. "You're not just mourning the person you lost. You're also mourning the person you'll never be again. All those happy memories, a lifetime, an entire childhood, retroactively turned sad."

A lazy tear rolled down her cheek and slid down her jaw. Frank wiped it away with the calloused pad of his thumb before it splattered on the bed sheet.

"Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it’s a really shitty attempt at cheering you up if I make myself cry," she said, smiled through the bleary eyes. 

"C'mere." He pulled her against him and sank bank into the pillows, her head tucked on his chest as she sniffled and made those short, choppy inhalations of stifled sobs. "Who did you lose?” 

"My brother. In a car accident. He was eighteen."

Blue light ripening into the full gold of early morning, they talked only a few minutes more. Karen wasn’t too keen on talking about her brother outside the mutual emotions of grief. So Frank dropped it, diverted from it with stupid jokes or idle touches. Had spent some of that time just staring at her, grinning like a goof. 

She slid into sleep first, and Frank’s own wakefulness folded, pulled into the darkness of slumber where long absent dreams untethered from the places he’d locked them away.

**Author's Note:**

> More to come! Not sure of the chapter count yet. Three? Maybe four? Definitely more than four at this point. Brevity wash over me...


End file.
